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MOTTIER DE LAFAYETTE, 



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MDCCCXXXIV. 



oaX QUiNCY ADAMS, 



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ORATION / 



LIFE AND CHARACTER 



or 



GILBERT MOTTIER DE LAFAYETTE, 



DELIVERED AT THE REaUEST OF BOTH HOUSES OF THE CONGRESS OF THE 

UNITED STATES, BEFORE THEM, IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES 

AT WASHINGTON, ON THE THIRTY-FIRST OF DECEMBER, 

MDCCCXXXIV. 



lY JOHN QUINCY ADAMS, 

II 

A MEMBER OF THE HOUSE. 



NEW- YORK: 

PUBLISHED BY D. K. MINOR, 35 WALL STREET. 

1835. 



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ORATION. 



FeUow -citizens of ike Senate and 

House of Representatives of the United States : 

If the authority by wliich I am now called to address you is one of the highest honors 
that could be conferred upon a citizen of this Union by his countrynien, I cannot di?;. 
semble to myself that it embraces at the same time one of the most arduous duties that 
could be imposed. Grateful to you for the honor conferred upon me by your invitation, 
a sentiment of irrepressible and fearful diffidence absorbs every faculty of my soul in 
contemplating the magnitude, the difficulties, and the delicacy of the task which it has 
been your pleasure to assign to me. 

I am to speak to the North American States and People, assembled here in the per- 
sons of their honored and confidential lawgivers and representatives. I am to speak 
to them, by their own appointment, upon the life and character of a man whose life was, 
for nearly threescore years, the history of the civilized world — of a man, of whose cha- 
racter, to say that it is indissolubly identified with the Revolution of our Independence, 
is little more than to mark the features of his childhood — of a man, the personified image 
of self-circumscribed liberty. Nor can it escape the most superficial observation, that, 
in speaking to the fathers of the land upon the life and character of Lafayette, 1 can- 
not forbear to touch upon topics which are yet deeply convulsing the world, both of opinion 
and of action. I am to walk between burning ploughshares — to tread upon fires which 
have not yet even collected cinders to cover them. 

If, in addressing their countrymen upon their most important interests, the orators of 
antiquity were accustomed to begin by supplication to their gods that nothing unsuitable 
to be said or unworthy to be heard might escape from their lips, how much more forcible 
is my obligation to invoke the fivor of Him " who touched Isaiah's hallowed lips with 
fire," not only to extinguish in the mind every conception unadapted to the grandeur and 
sublimity of the theme, but to draw from the bosom of the deepest conviction, thoughts 
congenial to the merits which it is the duty of the discourse to unfold, and words not 
unworthy of the dignity of the auditory before whom I appear. 

In order to form a just estimate of the life and character of Lafayette, it may be ne- 
nessary to advert, not only to the circumstances connected with his birth, education, and 
lineage, but to the political condition of his country and of Great Britain, her national 
rival and adversary, at the time of his birth, and during his years of childhood. 

On the sixth day of September, one thousand seven hundred and fifty-seven, the heredi- 
tary monarch of the British Islands was a native of Germany. A rude, illiterate old 
soldier of the wars for the Spanish succession ; little versed even in the language of the 
nations over which he ruled ; educated to the maxims and principles of the feudal law; 
of openly licentious life, and of moral character far from creditable : — he styled himself, 
by the grace of God, of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, King ; but there was another 
and real King of France, no better, perhaps worse, than himself, and with whom he was 
then at war. This was Louis, the fifteenth of the name, great-grandson of his imme- 



diate predecessor, Louis the Fourteenth, sometimes denominated the Great, These two 
kings held their thrones by the law of hereditary succession, variously modified, in France 
by the Roman Catholic, and in Britain by Protestant Reformed Christianity. 

They were at war — chiefly for conflicting claims to the possession of the western wil- 
derness of North America — a prize, the capabilities of M'hich are now unfoldinc^ them- 
selves with a grandeur and magnificence unexampled in the history of the world ; but of 
which, if the nominal possession had remained in either of the two princes, who were 
staking their kingdoms upon the issue of the strife, the buffalo and the beaver, with their 
hunter, the Indian savage, would, at this day, have been, as they then were, the only in- 
habitants. 

In this war, George Washington, then at the age of twenty-four, was on the side 
of the British German King, a youthful, but heroic combatant ; and, in the same war, 
the father of Lafayette was on the opposite side, exposing his life in the heart of Ger- 
many, for the cause of the King of France. 

On that day, the sixth of September, one thousand seven hundred and fifty-seven, was 
born GiLBEUT Motier De Lafayette, at the Castle of Chavaniac, in Auvergne, and 
a few months after his birth his fiither fell in battle at Minden. 

Let us here observe the influence of political institutions over the destinies and the 
characters of men. George the Second was a German Prince ; he had been made King 
of the British Islands by the accident of his birth : that is to say, because his great-grand- 
mother had been the daughter of James the First ; that great-grandmother had been 
married to the King of Bohemia, and her youngest daughter had been married to the 
Elector of Hanover. George the Second's father was her son, and, when James the 
Second had been expelled from his throne and his country by the indignation of his peo- 
ple, revolted against his tyranny, and when his two daughters, who succeeded him, had 
died without issue, George the First, the son of the Electress of Hanover, became King 
of Great Britain, by the settlement of an Act of Parliament, blending together the prin- 
ciple of hereditary succession with that of Reformed Protestant Christianity, and the 
rites of the Church of England. 

The throne of France was occupied by virtue of the same principle of hereditai-y 
succession, differently modified, and blended whh the Christianity of the Church of Rome. 
From this line of succession all females were inflexibly excluded. Louis the Fifteenth, 
at the age of six years, had become the absolute sovereign of France, because he was 
the great-grandson of his immediate predecessor. He was of the third generation in 
descent from the preceding king, and, by the law of primogeniture ingrafted upon that 
of lineal succession, did, by the death of his ancestor, forthwith succeed, though in child- 
liood, to an absolute throne, in preference to numerous descendants from that same an- 
cestor, then in the full vigor of manhood. 

The first reflection that must recur to a rational being, in contemplating these two 
results of the principle of hereditary succession, as resorted to for designating the rulers 
of nations, is, that two persons more unfit to occupy the thi'ones of Britain and of France, 
at the time of their respective accessions, could scarcely have been found upon the face 
of the globe — George tlie Second, a foreigner, the son and grandson of foreigners, born 
beyond the seas, educated in uncongenial manners, ignorant of the constitution, of the 
laws, even of the language of the people over whom he was to rule ; and Louis the Fif- 
teenth, an infant, incapable of discerning his right hand from his left. Yet, strange as 
it may sotuid to the ear of unsophisticated reason, the British Nation were wedded to 
the belief that this act of settlement, fixing their crown upon the heads of this succession 
of total strangers, was the brightest and most glorious exemplification of their national 
freedom ; and not less strange, if aught in the imperfection of human reason could seem 
strange, was that deep conviction of the French People, at the same period, that their 
chief glory and happiness consisted in the vehemence of their afl'ection for their king, 
because he was descended in an unbroken male line of genealogy from Saint Louis. 

One of the fruits of this line of hereditary succession, modified by sectarian principles 
of religion, was to make the peace and war, the happiness or misery of the people of the 
British Empire, dependant upon the fortunes of the Electorate of Hanover — the personal 
domain of their imported king. This was a result calamitous alike to the people of 



Hanover, of Britain, and of France ; fbr it was one of the two causes of that dreadflil 
war then waging between them ; and as the cause, so was this a principal theatre of 
that disastrous war. It was at Minden, in the heart of the Electorate of Hanover, that 
the father of Lafayette fell, and left him an orphan, a victim to that war, and to the 
principle of hereditaiy succession from which it emanated. 

Thus then, it was on the 6th of September, 1757, the day when Lafayette was born. 
The kings of France and Great Britain were seated upon their tlirones by virtue of the 
principle of hereditary succession, variously modified and blended with difterent forms of 
religious faith, and they were waging war against each other, and exhausting the blood 
and treasure of their people for causes in which neither of the nations had any beneficial 
or lawful interest. 

In this war the father of Lafayette fell in the cause of his king, but not of his country. 
He was an officer of an invading army, the instrument of his sovereign's wanton ambi- 
tion and lust of conquest. The people of the Electorate of Hanover had done no wrong 
to him or to his country. When his son came to an age capable of understanding the 
irreparable loss that he had suffered, and to reflect upon the causes of his father's fate, 
there was no drop of consolation mingled in the cup, from the consideration that he had 
died fbr his country. And when the youthful mind was awakened to meditation upon 
the rights of mankind, the principles of freedom, and theories of government, it cannot 
be difficult to perceive, in the illustrations of his own family records, the source of that 
aversion to hereditary rule, perhaps the most distinguishing feature of his political opinions, 
and to which he adhered through all the vicissitudes of his life. 

In the same war, and at the same time, George Washington was armed, a loyal sub- 
ject, in support of his king ; but to him that was also the cause of his country. His 
commission was not in the army of George the Second, but issued under the authority 
of the Colony of Virginia, the province in which he received his birth. On the borders 
of that province, the war in its most horrid forms was waged — not a war of mercy and 
of courtesy, like that of the civilized embattled legions of Europe ; but war to the knife 
— the war of Indian savages, terrible to man, but more terrible to the tender sex, and 
most terrible to helpless infancy. In defence of his country against the ravages of such 
a war, Washington, in the dawn of manhood, had drawn his sword, as if Providence, 
with deliberate purpose, had sanctified for him the practice of war, all-detestable and 
unhallowed as it is, that he might, in a cause, virtuous and exalted by its motive and its 
end, be trained and fitted in a congenial school to march in aftertimes the leader of 
heroes in the war of his country's Independence. 

At the time of the birth of Lafayette, this war, which was to make him a fatherless 
child, and in which Washington was laying broad and deep, in the defence and protec- 
tion of his native land, the foundations of his unrivalled renown, was but in its early 
stage. It was to continue five years longer, and was to close with the total extinguish, 
ment of the colonial dominion of France on the continent of North America. The deep 
humiliation of France, and the triumphant ascendancy on this continent of her rival, 
were the first results of this great national conllict. The complete expulsion of France 
from North America seemed, to the superficial vision of men, to fix the British power 
over these extensive regions on foundations immoveable as the everlasting hills. 

Let us pass in imagination a period of only twenty years, and alight upon the borders 
of the river Brandywine. Washington is Commander-in-chief of the armies of the 
United States of America — war is again raging in the heart of his native land — hostile 
armies of one and the same name, blood, and language, are arrayed for battle on tho 
banks of the stream ; and Philadelphia, where the United States are in Congress as- 
sembled, and whence their Decree of Independence has gone forth, is the destined prize 
to the conflict of the day. Who is that tall slender youth, of foreign air and aspect, 
scarcely emerged from the years of boyhood, and fiesh from the walls of a college ; 
fighting, a volunteer, at the side of Washington, bleeding, unconsciously to himself, and 
rallying his men to secure the retreat of the scattered American ranks ? It is Gilbert 
MoTiER DE Lafayette — the son of the victim of Minden ; and he is bleeding in the 
cause of North American Independence and of freedom. 

We pause one moment to inquire what was this cause of North American Indepen- 



dence, and what were the motives and inducements to the youthful stranger to devote 
himself, his life, and fortune, to it. 

The people of the British Colonies in North America, after a controversy of ten years' 
duration with their sovereign beyond the seas, upon an attempt by him and his parlia- 
ment to tax them wiiiiout their consent, had been constrained by necessity to declare 
themselves independent — to dissolve the tie of their allegiance to him — to renounce their 
right to his protection, and to asstune their station among the independent civilized 
nations of the earth. This had been done with a deliberation and solemnity unexampled 
in the history of the world — done in the midst of a civil war, differing in character from 
any of those which for conturies before had desolated Europe. Tlie war had arisen 
upon a question between tlie rights of the people and the powers of their government. 
The discussions, in the progress of the controversy, had opened to the contemplations of 
men the first foundations of civil society and of government. The war of Independence 
began by litigation upon a petty stamp on paper, and a tax of three pence a pound upon 
tea; but these broke up the fountains of the great deep, and the deluge ensued. Had 
the British Parliament the right to tax the people of the colonies in another hemisphere, 
not represented in the Imperial Legislature? They affirmed they had : tlie people of 
the colonies insisted they had not. There were ten years of pleading before they came 
to an issue ; and all the legitimate sources of power, and all the primitive elements of 
freedom, were scrutinized, debated, analyzed, and elucidated, before the lighting of the 
toi'ch of Ate, and her cry of havoc upon letting slip the dogs of war. 

When the day of conflict came, the issue of the contest was necessarily changed. 
The people of the colonies had maintained the contest on the principle of resisting the 
invasion of chartered rights — first by argument and remonstrance, and finally by appeal 
to the sword. But with the war came the necessary exercise of sovereign powers. 
The Declaration of Independence justified itself as the only possible remedy for insuffer- 
able wrongs. It seated itself upon the first foundations of the law of nature, and the 
incontestable doctrine of human rights. There was no longer any question of the con- 
stitutional powers of the British Parliament, or of violated colonial charters. Thence- 
forward the American Nation supported its existence by war ; and the British Nation, 
by war, was contending for conquest. As, between the two parties, the single question 
at issue was Independence — but in the confederate existence of the North American 
Union, Liberty — not only their own liberty, but the vital principle of liberty to the whole 
race of civilized man, was involved. 

It was at this stage of the conflict, and immediately after the Declaration of Indepen- 
dence, that it drew the attention, and called into action the moral sensibihties and the 
intellectual faculties of Lafayette, then in the nineteenth year of his age. 

The war was revolutionary. It began by the dissolution of the British Government 
in the colonies ; the people of which were, by that operation, left without any govern, 
ment whatever. They were then at one and the same time maintaining their indepen- 
dent national existence by war, and forming new social compacts for their own govern- 
mcat thenceforward. The construction of civil society ; the extent and the limitations 
of organized power ; the establishment of a system of government combining the greatest 
enlargement of individual liberty with the most perfect preservation of public order, were 
the continual occupations of every mind. The consequences of this state of things to 
the history of mankind, and especially of Europe, were foreseen by none. Europe saw 
nothing but the war ; a people struggling for liberty, and against oppression ; and the 
people in every part of Europe sympathized with the people of the American Colonies. 

With their governments it was not so. The people of the American Colonies were 
insurgents ; all governments abhor insurrection ; they were revolted colonists. The 
great maritime powers of Europe had colonies of their own, to which the example of 
resistance against oppression might be contagious. The American Colonies were stig. 
matized in all the official acts of the British Government as rebels ; and rebellion to the 
governing part of mankind is as the sin of witchcraft. The governments of Europe, 
therefore were, at heart, on the side of the British Government in this war, and the people 
of Europe were on the side of the American people. 

Lafayette, by his position and condition in life, was one of those who, governed by the 



ordinary impulses which influence and control the conduct of men, would have sided in 
sentiment with the British or Royal cause. 

Lafayette was born a subject of the most absolute and most splendid monarchy of 
Europe, and in the highest rank of her proud and chivalrous nobility. He had been edu- 
cated at a colleo-e of the University of Paris, founded by the royal munificence of Louis 
the Fourteenth, or of his minister. Cardinal Richelieu. Left an orphan in early child- 
hood, with the inheritance of a princely fortune, he had been married, at sixteen years 
of age, to a daughter of the house of Noailles, the most distinguished family of the king, 
dom, scarcely deemed in public consideration inferior to that which wore the crown. 
He came into active life, at the change from boy to man, a husband and a father, in the 
full enjoyment of every thing that avarice could covet, with a certain prospect before 
him of all that ambition could crave. Happy in his domestic affections, incapable, from 
the benignity of his nature, of envy, hatred, or revenge, a life of " ignoble ease and indo- 
lent repose" seemed to be that which nature and fortune had combined to prepare before 
him. To men of ordinary mould this condition would have led to a life of luxurious 
apathy and sensual indulgence. Such was the life into which, from the operation of the 
same causes, Louis the Fifteenth had sunk, with his household and court, while Lafay- 
ette was rising to manhood, surrounded by the contamination of their example. Had 
his natural endowments been even of the higher and nobler order of such as adhere to 
virtue, even in the lap of prosperity, and in the bosom of temptation, he might have 
lived and died a pattern of the nobility of France, to be classed, in aftertimes, with the 
Turennes and the Montausiers of the age of Louis the Fourteenth, or with the Villars or 
the Lamoignons of the age immediately preceding his own. 

But as, in the firmament of heaven that rolls over our heads, there is, among the stars 
of the first magnitude, one so pre-eminent in splendor, as, in the opinion of astronomers, 
to constitute a class by itself; so, in the fourteen hundred years of the French Monarchy, 
among the multitudes of great and mighty men which it has evolved, the name of La- 
fayette stands unrivalled in the solitude of glory. 

In entering upon the threshold of life, a career was to open before him. He had the 
option of the court and the camp. An office was tendered to him in the household of 
the king's brother, the Count de Provence, since successively a royal exile and a re- 
instated king. The servitude and inaction of a court had no charms for him ; he pre- 
ferred a commission in the army, and, at the time of the Declaration of Independence, 
was a captain of dragoons in garrison at Metz. 

There, at an entertainment given by his relative, the Marechal de Broglie, the com- 
mandant of the place, to the Duke of Gloucester, brother to the British King, and then 
a transient traveller through that part of France, he learns, as an incident of intelli- 
gence received that morning by the English Prince from London, that the Congress of 
Rebels, at Philadelphia, had issued a Declaration of Independence. A conversation en- 
sues upon the causes which have contributed to produce this event, and upon the conse- 
quences which may be expected to flow from it. The imagination of Lafayette has 
caught across the Atlantic tide the spark emitted from the Declaration of Independence ; 
his heart has kindled at the shock, and, before he slumbers upon his pillow, he has resolved 
to devote his life and fortune to the cause. 

You have before you the cause and the man. The self-devotion of Lafayette was 
twofold. First, to the people, maintaining a bold and seemingly desperate struggle against 
oppression, and for national existence. Secondly, and chiefly, to the principles of their 
Declaration, which then first unfurled before his eyes the consecrated standard of human 
rights. To that standard, without an instant of hesitation, he repaired. Where it would 
lead him, it is scarcely probable that he himself then foresaw. It was then identical 
with the stars and stripes of the American Union, floating to the breeze from the Hall 
of Independence, at Philadelphia. Nor sordid avarice, nor vulgar ambition, could point 
his footsteps to the pathway leading to that banner. To the love of ease or pleasure 
nothing could be more repulsive. Something may be allowed to the beatings of the 
youthful breast, which make ambition virtue, and something to the spirit of military ad- 
venture, imbibed from his profession, and which he felt in common with many others. 
France, Germany, Poland, furnished to the armies of this Union, in our revolutionary 



8 

struggle, no inconsiderable number of officers of high rank and distinguished merit. The 
names of Pulaski and De Kalb are numbered among the martyrs of our freedom, and 
their ashes repose in our soil side by side with the canonized bones of Warren' and 
of Montgomery. To the virtues of Lafayette, a more protracted career and happier 
earthly destinies were reserved. To the moral principle of political action, the sacri- 
fices of no other man were comparable to his. Youth, health, fortune ; the favor of his 
king ; the enjoyment of ease and pleasure ; even the choicest blessings of domestic fe- 
licity — he gave them all for toil and danger in a distant land, and an almost hopeless 
cause ; but it was the cause of justice, and of the rights of human kind. 

The resolve is firmly fixed, and it now remains to be carried into execution. On the 
7th of December, 1776, Silas Deane, then a secret agent of the American Congress at 
Paris, stipulates with the Marquis de Lafayette that he shall receive a commission, to 
date from that day, of Major-General in the Army of the United States ; and the Mar- 
quis stipulates, in return, to depart when and how Mr. Deane shall judge proper, to serve 
the United States with all possible zeal, without pay or emolument, reserving to himself 
only the liberty of returning to Europe if his family or his king should recall him. 

Neither his family nor his king were willing that he should depart ; nor had Mr. Deane 
the power, either to conclude this contract, or to furnish the means of his conveyance to 
America. Difficulties rise up before him only to be dispersed, and obstacles thicken 
only to be surmounted. The day after the signature of the contract, Mr. Deane's agency 
was superseded by the arrival of Doctor Benjamin Franklin and Arthur Lee as his col- 
leagues in commission ; nor did they think themselves authorized to confirm his engage- 
ments. Lafayette is not to be discouraged. The commissioners extenuate nothing of 
the unpromising condition of their cause. Mr. Deane avows his inability to furnish him 
with a passage to the United States. " The more desperate the cause," says Lafayette, 
"the greater need has it of my services; and, if Mr. Deane has no vessel for my pas- 
sage, I shall purchase one myself, and will traverse the ocean with a selected company 
of my own." 

Other impediments arise. His design becomes known to the British Ambassador at 
the Court of Versailles, who remonstrates to the French Government against it. At his 
instance, orders are issued for the detention of the vessel purchased by the Marquis, and 
fitted out at Bordeaux, and for the arrest of his person. To elude the first of these 
orders, the vessel is removed from Bordeaux to the neighboring port of Passage, within 
the dominion of Spain. The order for his own arrest is executed ; but, by stratagem 
and disguise, he escapes from the custody of those who have him in charge, and, before 
a second order can reach him, he is safe on the ocean wave, bound to the land of Inde- 
pendence and of freedom. 

It had been necessary to clear out the vessel for an island of the West Indies ; but, 
once at sea, he avails himself of his right as owner of the ship, and compels his captain 
to steer for the shores of emancipated North America. He lands, with his companions, 
on the 25th of April, 1777, in South Carolina, not far from Charleston, and finds a most 
cordial reception and hospitable welcome in the house of Major Huger. 

Every detail of this adventurous expedition, full of incidents, combining with the sim- 
plicity of historical truth all the interest of romance, is so well known, and so familiar 
to the memory of all who hear me, that I pass them over without further notice. 

From Charleston he proceeded to Philadelphia, where the Congress of the Revolution 
were in session, and where he offered his services in the cause. Here, again, he was 
met with difficulties, which, to men of ordinary minds, would have been insurmountable. 
Mr. Deane's contracts were so numerous, and for offices of rank so high, that it was im- 
possible they should be ratified by the Congress. He had stipulated for the appointment 
of other Major-Generals ; and, in the same contract with that of Lafayette, for eleven 
other officers, from the rank of Colonel to that of Lieutenant. To introduce these offi- 
cers, strangers, scarcely one of whom could speak the language of the country, into the 
American army, to take rank and precedence over the native citizens whose ardent pa- 
triotism had pointed them to the standard of their country, could not, without great in- 
justice, nor without exciting the most fatal dissensions, have been done ; and this answer 
was necessarily given aa well to Lafayette as to the other officers who had accompanied 



9 

him from Europe. His rcpJy was an offer to serve as a volunteer, and without pa). 
Magnanimity, thus disinterested, could not be resisted, nor could the sense of it be wor- 
thily manifested by a mere acceptance of the otfer. On the 31st of July, 1777, there- 
fore, the following resolution and preamble are recorded upon tiie journals of congress. 

" Whereas, the Marquis de Lafayette, out of his great zeal to tlie cause of liberty, in 
which the United Stales are engaged, has left his family and coimexions, and, at his own 
expense, come over to offer his service to the United Slates, without pension, or particular 
allowance, and is anxious to risk his life in our cause : 

" Resolved, That his service be accepted, and that, in consideration of his zeal, illus- 
trious family, and connexions, he have the rank and covimission of Major-General in the 
army of the United States." 

He had the rank and commission, but no command as a Major-General. With this, 
all personal ambition was gratified ; and whatever services he might perform, he could 
attain no higher rank in the American army. The discontents of officers already in the 
service, at being superseded in Command by a stripling foreigner, were disarmed ; nor 
was the prudence of congress, perhaps, v/ithout its influence in withholding a command, 
wiiich, but for a judgment premature " beyond the slow advance of years," might have 
liazarded something of the sacred cause itself, by confidence too hastily bestowed. 

The day after the date of his commission, he was introduced to Washington, Com- 
mander-in-chief of the armies of the Confederation. It was the critical period of the 
campaign of 1777. The British army, commanded by Lord Howe, was advancing from 
the head of Elk, to which they had been transported by sea from New-York, upon 
Philadelphia. Washington, by a counteracting movement, had been approaching from 
his line of defence, in the Jerseys, towards the city, and arrived there on the 1st of 
August. It was a meeting of congenial souls. At the close of it, Washington gave the 
youthful stranger an invitation to make the head-quarters of the Commander-in-chief his 
home : that he should establish himself there at his own time, and consider himself at 
all times as one of his family. It was natural that, in giving this invitation, he should 
remark the contrast of the situation in which it would place him, with that of ease, and 
comfort, and luxurious enjoyment, which he had left, at the splendid court of Louis the 
Sixteenth, and of his beautiful and accomplished, but ill-fated queen, then at the very 
summit of all which constitutes the common estimate of felicity. How deep and solemn 
was this contrast ! No native American had undergone the trial of the same alternative. 
None of them, save Lafayette, had brought the same tribute, of his life, his fortune, and 
his honor, to a cause of a country foreign to his own. To Lafayette the soil of freedom 
was his country. His post of honor was the post of danger. His fireside was the field 
of battle. He accepted with joy the invitation of Washington, and repaired forthwith to 
the camp. The bond of indissoluble friendship — the friendship of heroes, was sealed 
from the first hour of their meeting, to last through their Uves, and to live in the memory 
of mankind for ever. 

It was, perhaps, at the suggestion of the American Commissioners in France, that this 
invitation was given by Washington. In a letter from them, of the 25th of May, 1777, 
to the Committee of Foreign Affairs, they announce that the Marquis had departed for 
the United States in a ship of his own, accompanied by some officers of distinction, in 
Older to serve in our armies. They observe that he is exceedingly beloved, and that 
every body's good wishes attend him. They cannot but hope that he will meet with 
such a reception as will make the country and his expedition agreeable to him. They 
further say that those who censure it as imprudent in him, do nevertheless applaud his 
spirit ; and they are satisfied that civilities and respect shown to him will be serviceable 
to our cause in France, as pleasing not only to his powerful relations and to the court, 
but to the whole French nation. They finally add, that he had left a beautiful young 
wife, and for her sake, particularly, they hoped that his bravery and ardent desire to 
distinguish himself would be a little restrained by the General's (Washington's) prudence, 
so as not to permit his being hazarded much, but upon some important occasion. 

The hea!d-quarters of Washington, serving as a volur\teer, with the rank and com- 
mission of a Major-General without command, was precisely the station adapted to the 
development of his character, to his own honor, and that of the army, and to the prudent 

2 



10 

management of the country's cause. To him it wag at once a severe school of experi- 
ence, and a rigorous test of merit. But it was not the place to restrain him from exposure 
to danger. The time at which he joined the camp was one of pre-eminent peril. The 
British Government, and the Commander-in-chief of the British forces, had imagined that 
the possession of Philadelphia, combined with that of the line along the Hudson river, 
from the Canadian frontier to the city of New-York, would be fatal to the American 
cause. By the capture of Burgoyne and his army, that portion of the project sustained 
a total defeat. The final issue of the war was indeed sealed witli the capitulation of the 
17th of October, 1777, at Saratoga — sealed, not with the subjugation, but with the inde- 
pendence of the North American Union. 

In the southern, campaign the British commander was more successful. The fall of 
Philadelphia was the result of the battle of Brandywine, on the 1 1th of September. This 
was the first action in which Lafayette was engaged, and the first lesson of his practical 
militaiy school was a lesson of misfortune. In the attempt to rally the American troops 
in their retreat, he received a musket-ball in the leg. He was scarcely conscious of the 
wound till made sensible of it by the loss of blood, and even then ceased not his exertions 
in the field till he had secured and covered the retreat. 

This casualty confined him for some time to his bed at Philadelphia, and afterwards 
detained him some days at Bethlehem ; but within six weeks he rejoined the head- 
quarters of Washington, near Whitemarsh. He soon became anxious to obtain a com- 
mand equal to his rank, and in the short space of time that he had been with the com- 
mander-in-chief, had so thoroughly obtained his confidence as to secure an earnest 
solicitation from him to congress in his favor. In a letter to congress of the 1st No- 
vember, 1777, he says : " The Marquis de Lafayette is extremely solicitous of having a 
command equal to his rank. I do not know in what light congress will view the mat- 
ter, but it appears to me, from a consideration of his illustrious and important connexions, 
the attachment which he has manifested for our cause, and the consequences which his 
return in disgust might produce, that it will be advisable to gratify him in his wislies ; and 
the more so, as several gentlemen from France, who came over under some assurances, 
have gone back disappointed in their expectations. His conduct with respect to them 
stands in a favorable point of view ; having interested himself to remove their uneasiness, 
and urged the impropriety of their making any unfavorable representations upon their 
arrival at home ; and in all his letters he has placed our affairs in the best situation he 
could. Besides, he is sensible, discreet in his manners ; has made great proficiency in 
our language ; and, from tlie disposition he discovered at the battle of Brandywine, pos- 
sesses a large share of bravery and military ardor." 

Perhaps one of the highest encomiums ever pronounced of a man in public life, is 
that of an historian eminent for his profound acquaintance with mankind, who, in painting 
a great character by a single line, says that he was just equal to all the duties of the 
highest oflnices which he attained, and never above them. There are in some men quali- 
ties which dazzle and consume to httle or no valuable purpose. They seldom belong 
to the great benefactors of mankind. They were not the qualities of Washington or 
Lafayette. The testimonial offered by the American commander to his young friend, 
after a probation of several months, and after the severe test of the disastrous day of 
Brandywine, was precisely adapted to the man in whose favor it was given, and to the 
object which it was to accomplish. What earnestness of purpose! what sincerity of 
conviction ! what energetic simplicity of expression ! what thorough delineation of cha- 
racter ! The merits of Lafayette, to the eye of Washington, are the candor and gene- 
rosity of his disposition — the indefatigable industry of application which, in the course 
of a few months, has already given him the mastery of a foreign language — good sense 
— discretion of manners, an attribute not only unusual in early years, but doubly rare in 
alliance with that enthusiasm so signally marked by his self-devotion to the American 
cause ; and, to crown all the rest, the bravery and military ardor so brilliantly mani- 
fested at the Brandywine. Here is no random praise ; no unmeaning panegyric. The 
cluster of qualities, all plain and simple, but so seldom found in union together, so gene- 
rally incompatible with one another, these are the properties eminently trustworthy, in 
the judgment of Washington ; and these are the properties which his discernment has 



I 



11 

found in Lafayette, and which urge him thus earnestly to advise the gratification of hi3 
wish by the assignment of a command equal to the rank which had been granted to his 
zeal and his illustrious name. 

The recommendation of Washington had its immediate effect ; and on the 1st of De- 
cember, 1777, it was resolved by congress that he should be informed it was highly 
agreeable to congress that the Marquis de Lafayette should be appointed to the com- 
mand of a division in the Continental Army. 

He received accordingly such an appointment ; and a plan was organized in congress 
for a second invasion of Canada, at the head of which he was placed. This expedition, 
originally projected without consultation with the commander-in-chief, might be con- 
nected with the temporary dissatisfaction, in the community and in congress, at the ill- 
success of his endeavors to defend Philadelphia, which rival and unfriendly partisans 
were too ready to compare with the splendid termination, by the capture of Burgoync 
and his army, of t!ie northern campaign, under the command of General Gates. To 
foreclose all suspicion of participation in these views, Lafayette proceeded to the seat of 
congress, and, accepting the important charge which it was proposed to assign to him, 
obtained at his particular request that he should be considered as an officer detached 
from the army of Washington, and to remain under his orders. He then repaired in 
j)erson to Albany, to take command of the troops who were to assemble at that place, in 
order to cross the lakes on the ice, and attack Montreal ; but on arri\ ing at Albany he 
found none of the promised preparations in readiness — they were never effected. Con- 
gress some time after relinquished the design, and the Marquis was ordered to rejoin the 
army of Washington. 

In the succeeding month of May, his military talent was displayed by the masterly 
retreat effected in the presence of an overwhelming superiority of the enemy's force 
from the position at Barren Hill. 

He was soon after distinguished at the battle of Monmouth ; and in September, 1778, 
a resolution of congress declared their high sense of his services, not only in the field, 
but in his exertions to conciliate and heal dissensions between the officers of the French 
fleet under the command of Count d'Estaing and some of the native officers of our army. 
These dissensions had arisen in the first moments of co-operation in the service, and had 
threatened pernicious consequences. 

In the month of April, 1776, the combined wisdom of the Count de Vergennes and 
of Mr. Turgot, the Prime Minister, and the Financier of Louis the Sixteenth, had brought 
him to the conclusion that the event most desirable to France, with regard to the con- 
troversy between Great Britain and her American Colonies, was that the insurrection 
should be suppressed. This judgment, evincing only the total absence of all moral con- 
siderations, in the estimate, by these eminent statesmen, of what was desirable to France, 
had undergone a great change by the close of the year 1777. The Declaration of 
Independence had changed the question between the parties. The popular feeling of 
France was all on the side of the Americans. The daring and romantic movement of 
Lafayette, in defiance of the government itself, then highly favored by public opinion, 
was followed by universal admiration. The spontaneous spirit of the people gradually 
spread itself even over the rank corruption of the court ; a suspicious and deceptive 
neutrality succeeded to an ostensible exclusion of the Insurgents from the ports of France, 
till the capitulation of Burgoyne satisfied the casuists of international law at Versailles, 
that the suppression of the insurrection was no longer the most desirable of events; but 
that the United States were, de facto, sovereign and independen' and that France 
might conclude a Treaty of Commerce with them, without giv ing just cause of offence 
to the stepmother country. On the 6th of February, 177S, a Treaty of Commerce 
between France and the United States was concluded, and with it, on the same day, a 
Treaty of eventual Defensive Alliance, to take effect only in the event of Great Britain's 
resenting, by war against France, the consummation of the Commercial Treaty. The 
war immediately ensued, and in the summer of 1778 a French fleet, under the command 
of Count d'Estaing, was sent to co-operate with the forces of the United States for the 
maintenance of their Independence. 

By these events the position of the Marquis de Lafayette was essentially changed. It 



13 

became necessary for him to reinstate himself in the good graces of his sovereign, ofiended 
at his absenting himself from his country without permission, but gratified with the 
distinction \\hich he had acquired by gallant deeds in a service now become that of 
France herself. At the close of the campaign of 1778, with the approbation of his 
friend and patron, the commander-in-chief, he addressed a letter to the President of Con- 
gress, representing his then present circumstances with the confidence of affection and 
gratitude, observing that the sentiments which bound him to his country could never be 
more properly spoken of than in the presence of men who had done so much for their 
own. " As long," continued he, " as I thought I could dispose of myself, I made it my 
pride and pleas-are to fight under American colors, in defence of a cause which I dare 
more particularly call ours, because I had the good fortune of bleeding for her. Now, 
Sir, that France is involved in a war, I am urged, by a sense of my duty, as well as by 
the love of my country, to present myself before the king, and know in what manner he 
judges proper to employ my services. The most agreeable of all will always be such 
as may enable me to serve the common cause among those whose friendship I had the 
happiness to obtain, and whose fortune I had the honor to follow in less smiling times. 
That reason, and others, which I leave to the feelings of congress, engage me to beg 
from them the liberty of going home for the next winter. 

" As long as there were any hopes of an active campaign, I did not think of leaving 
the field ; now that I see a very peaceable and undisturbed moment, I take this oppor- 
tunity of waiting on congress." 

In the remainder of the letter he solicited that, in the event of his request being granted, 
he might be considered as a soldier on furlough, heartily wishing to regain his colors and 
his esteemed and beloved fellow-soldiers. And he closes with a tender of any services 
which he might be enabled to render to the American cause in his own country. 

On the receipt of this letter, accompanied by one from General Washington, recom. 
mending to congress, in terms most honorable to the Marquis, a compliance with his 
request, that body immediately passed resolutions granting him an unlimited leave of 
absence, with permission to return to the United States at his own most convenient time ; 
that the President of Congress should write him a letter returning him the thanks of 
congress for that disinterested zeal which had led him to America, and for the services he 
had rendered to the United States by the exertion of his courage and abilities on many 
signal occasions ; and that the Minister Plenipotentiary of the United States at the Court 
of Versailles should be directed to cause an elegant sword, with proper devices, to be 
made, and presented to him in the name of the United States. These resohilions were 
communicated to him in a letter expressive of the sensibility congenial to them, from the 
President of Congress, Henry Laurens. 

He embarked in January, 1779, in the frigate Alliance, at Boston, and, on the suc- 
ceeding 12th day of February, presented himself at Versailles. Twelve months had 
already elapsed since the conclusion of the treaties of commerce and of eventual alliance 
between France and the United States. They had, during the greater part of (hat time, 
been deeply engaged in war with a common cause against Great Britain, and it was the 
cause in which Latayette had been shedding his blood ; yet, instead of receiving him 
with open arms, as the pride and ornament of his country, a cold and hollow-hearted 
order was issued to him not to present himself at court, but to consider himself under 
arrest, with permission to receive visits only from his relations. This ostensible mark 
of the royal displeasure was to last eight days, and Lafayette manifested his sense of it 
only by a letter to the Count de Vergennes, inquiring whether the interdiction upon him 
to receive visits Avas to be considered as extending to that of Doctor Franklin. The 
sentiment of universal admiration which had followed him at his first departure, greatly 
increased by his splendid career of service during the two years of his absence, indem- 
nified him for the indignity of the courtly rebuke. 

He remained in France through the year 1779, and returned to the scene of action 
early in the ensuing year. He continued in the French service, and was appointed to 
command the king's own regiment of dragoons, stationed during the year in various parts 
of the kingdom, and holding an incessant correspondence with the Ministers of Foreign 
Affairs and of War, urging the employment of a land and naval force in aid of th« 



13 

American cause. "The Marquis de Lafayette," 8a.ys Doctor Franklin, in a letter of 
the 4th of March, 1780, to the President of Congress, " who during his residence in 
France, has been extremely zealous in supporting our cause on all occasions, returns 
again to tight for it. He is infinitely esteemed and beloved here, and I am persuaded 
will do every thing in his power to merit a continuance of the same affection from 
America." 

Immediately after his arrival in the United States, it was, on the 16th of May, 1780, 
resolved in congress, that they considered his return to America to resume his command, 
as a fresh proof of the disinterested zeal and persevering attachment which have justly 
recommended him to the public confidence and applause, and that they received with 
pleasure a tender of the further services of so gallant and meritorious an officer. 

From this time until the termination of the campaign of 1781, by the surrender of 
Lord Cornwallis and his army at Yorktown, his service was of incessant activity, al- 
ways signalized by military talents unsurpassed, and by a spirit never to be subdued. 
At the time of the treason of Arnold, Lafayette was accompanying his commander-in- 
chief to an important conference and consultation with the French general, Rocham- 
beau ; and then, as in every stage of the war, it seemed as if the ])osition which he oc- 
cupied, his personal character, his individual relations with Washington, with the officers 
of both the allied armies, and with the armies themselves, had been specially ordered to 
promote and secure that harmony and mutual good understanding indispensable to the 
ultimate success of the common cause. His position, too, as a foreigner by birth, a Eu- 
ropean, a volunteer in the American service, and a person of high rank in his native 
country, pointed him out as peculiarly suited to the painful duty of deciding upon the 
character of the crime, and upon the fate of the British officer, the accomplice and vie- 
tim of the detested traitor, Arnold. 

In the early part of the campaign of 1781, when Cornwallis, with an overwhelming 
force, was spreading ruin and devastation over the southern portion of the Union, we 
find Lafayette, with means altogether inadequate, charged with the defence of the ter- 
ritory of Virginia. Always equal to the emergencies in which circumstances placed 
him, his expedients for encountering and surmounting the obstacles which they cast in 
his way are invariably stamped with the peculiarities of his character. The troops 
placed under his command fjr the defence of Virginia, were chiefly taken from the 
eastern regiments, unseasoned to the climate of the south, and prejudiced against it as 
unfavorable to the health of the natives of the more rigorous regions of the north. 
Desertions became frequent, till they threatened the very.dissolution of the corps. In- 
stead of resorting to military execution to retain his men, he appeals to the sympathies 
of honor. He states, in general orders, the great danger and difficulty of the enterprise 
upon which he is about to embark ; represents the only possibility by which it can pro- 
mise success, the faithful adherence of the soldiers to their chief, and his confidence that 
they will not abandon him. He then adds, that if, however, any individual of the de- 
tachment was unwilling to follow him, a passport to reliirn to his l;ome should be furthwith 
granted him upon his application. It is to a cause like that of American Independence 
that resources like this are congenial. After these general orders, nothing more was 
heard of desertion. The very cripples of the army preferred paying for their own trans- 
portation, to follow the corps, rather than to ask for the dismission which had been made 
so easily accessil)le to all. 

But how shall the deficiencies of the military chest be supplied ? The want of money 
was heavily pressing upon the service in every direction. Where are the sinews of 
war ? How are the troops to march without shoes, linen, clothing of all descriptions, 
and other necessaries of life ? Lafayette has found them all. From the patriotic mer- 
chants of Baltimore he obtains, on the pledge of his own personal credit, a loan of money 
adequate to the purchase of the materials ; and from the fair hands of the daughters of 
the monumental city, even then worthy to be so called, he obtains the toil of making up 
the needed garments. 

The details of the campaign, from its unpromising outset, when Cornwallis, the British 
commander, exulted in anticipation that the boy could not escape him, till the storming 
of the twin redoubts, in emulation of gallantry by the valiant Frenchmen of Viomesnil, 



14 

and the American fellow-sokliers of Lafayette, led by him to victory at Yorktown, must 
be left to the recordhig pen of history. Both redoubts were carried at the point of the 
sword, and CornwalHs, witli averted face, surrendered his sword to Washington. 

'i'his was tlie hist vital stni<igle of the war, which, however, lingered through another 
year rather of negotiation than of action. Immediately after the capitulation at York- 
town, Lafayette asked and obtained again a leave of absence to visit his family and his 
country, and with this closed his military service in the field during the Revolutionary 
War. But it was not for the individual enjoyment of his renown that he returned to 
France. The resolutions of congress accompanying that which gave him a discretionary 
leave of absence, Avhile honorary in the highest degree to him, were equally marked by 
a grant of virtual credentials for negotiation, and by the trust of confidential powers, 
together with a letter of the warmest commendation of the gallant soldier to the favor 
of his king. The ensuing year was consumed iu preparations for a formidable combined 
French and Spanish expedition against the British Islands in the West Indies, and par- 
ticularly the Island of Jamaica; thence to recoil upon New-York, and to pursue the of- 
fensive war into Canada. The fleet destined for this gigantic undertaking was already 
'ssembled at Cadiz; and Lafayette, appointed the chief of the staff, was there ready 
to embar'- upon this perilous adventure, when, on the 30th of November, 1782, the pre- 
liminary treaties of peace were concluded between his Britannic Majesty on one part, 
and the allied powers of France, Spain, and the United States of America, on the other. 
The first intelligence of this event received by the American congress was in the com- 
munication of a letter from Lafayette. 

The war of American Independence is closed. The people of the North American 
Confederation are in union, sovereign and independent. Lafayette, at twenty-five years 
of age, has lived the life of a patriarch, and illustrated the career of a hero. Had his 
days upon earth been then numbered, and had he then slept with his fathers, illustrious 
as for centuries their names had been, his name, to the end of time, would have tran- 
scended them all. Fortunate youth ! fortunate beyond even the measure of his com- 
panions in arms with whom he had achieved the glorious consummation of American In- 
dependence. His fame was all his own ; not cheaply earned ; not ignobly won. His 
fellow-soldiers had been the champions and defenders of their country. They reaped 
for themselves, for their wives, their children, their posterity to the latest time, the re- 
wards of their dangers and their toils. Lafayette had watched, and labored, and fought, 
and bled, not for himself, not for his family, not, in the first instance, even for his coun- 
try. In the legendary tales of chivalry we read of tournaments at which a foreign and 
unknown knight suddenly presents himself, armed in complete steel, and, with the vizor 
down, enters the ring to contend with the assembled flower of knighthood for the prize 
of honor, to be awarded by the hand of beauty ; bears it in triumph away, and disap- 
pears from the astonished multitude of competitors and spectators of the feats of arms. 
But where, in the rolls of history, where, in the fictions of romance, where, but in the 
life of Lafayette, has been seen the noble stranger, flying, with the tribute of his name, his 
rank, his affluence, his ease, his domestic bliss, his treasure, his blood, to the relief of a 
suffering and distant land, in the hour of her deepest calamity — baring his bosom to her 
foes ; and not at the transient pageantry of a tournament, but for a succession of five 
years sharing all the vicissitudes of her fortunes ; always eager to appear at the post of 
danger — tempering the glow of youthful ardor with the cold caution of a veteran com- 
mander ; bold and daring in action ; prompt in execution ; rapid^n pursuit ; fertile in 
expedients ; unattainable in retreat ; often exposed, but never surprised, never discon- 
certed ; eluding his enemy when within his fancied grasp ; bearing upon him with irre- 
sistible sway when of force to cope with him in the conflict of arms? And what is this 
but the diary of Lafayette, from the day of his rallying the scattered fugitives of the 
Brandywine, insensible of the blood flowing from his wound, to the storming of the re- 
doubt at Yorktown ? 

Henceforth, as a public man, Lafayette is to be considered as a Frenchman, always 
active and ardent to serve the United States, but no longer in their service as an officer. 
So transcendent had been his merits in the common cause, that, to I'eward them, the 
rule of progressive advancement in the armies of France was set aside for him. He 



15 

received from the Minister of War a notification that fVom the day of hia retirement 
from the service of the United States as a major-general, at the close of the war, he 
should hold tiie same rank in the armies of France, to date from the day of the capitu- 
lation of Lord Cornwallis. 

Henceforth he is a Frenchman, destined to perform in the history of his country a 
part, as peculiarly his own, and not less glorious than that which he had performed in 
the war of Independence. A short period of profound peace followed the great triumph 
of freedom. The desire of Lafayette once more to see the land of his adoption and the 
associates of his glory, the fellow-soldiers who t)ad become to him as brothers, and the 
friend and patron of his youth, who had become to him as a father ; sympathizing with 
their desire once more to see him — to see in tlieir prosperity him who had first come 
to them in their affliction, induced him, in the year 1784, to pay a visit to the United 
States. 

On the 4th of August, of that year, he landed at New-York, and, in the space of five 
months from that time, visited his venerable friend at M(iunt Vernon, where he was then 
living in retirement, and traversed ten States of the Union, receiving everywhere, from 
their legislative assemblies, from the municipal bodies of tiie cities and towns througl</j 
which he passed, from the officers of the army, his late associates, now resto'".ird to the 
virtues and occupations of private life, and even from the recent emigrants from Ireland, 
who had come to adopt for their country the self-emancipated land, addresses of gratu- 
lation and of joy, the effusions of hearts grateful in the enjoyment of the blessings for 
the possession of which they had been so largely indebted to his exertions — and finally, 
from the United States of America in congress assembled at Trenton. 

On the 9th of December it was resolved by that body that a committee, to consist of 
one member from each State, should be appointed to receive, and in the name of con. 
gross take leave of the Marquis. That they should be instructed to assure him that con- 
gress continued to entertain the same high sense of his abilities and zeal to promote the 
welfare of America, both here and in Europe, which tliey had frequently exjjressed and 
manifested on former occasions, and which the recent marks of his attention to their 
commercial and other interests had perfectly confirmed. " That, as his uniform and un- 
ceasing attachment to this country has resembled that of a patriotic citizen, the United 
States regard him with particular affection, and will not cease to feel an interest in what- 
ever may concern his honor and prosperity, and that their best and kindest wishes will 
always attend him." 

And it was further resolved, that a letter be written to his Most Christian Majesty, to 
be signed by his Excellency the President of Congress, expressive of the high sense 
which the United States in congress assembled entertain of the zeal, talents, and merito- 
rious services of the Marquis de Lafayette, and recommending him to the favor and 
patronage of his Majesty. 

The first of these resolutions was, on the next day, carried into execution. At a 
solemn interview with the committee of congress, received in their hall, and addressed 
by the chairman of their committee, John Jay, the purport of these resolutions was com- 
municated to him. He replied in terms of fervent sensibility for the kindness manifested 
personally to himself; and, with allusions to the situation, the prospects, and the duties 
of the people of this country, he pointed out the great interests which he believed it 
indispensable to their weltare that they should cultivate and cherish. In the following 
memorable sentences the ultimate objects of his solicitude are disclosed in a tone deeply 
solemn and impressive : 

" May this immense temple of freedom," said he, " ever stand, a lesson to oppressors, 
an example to the oppressed, a sanctuary for the rights of mankind ! and may these 
happy United States attain that complete splendor and prosperity which will illustrate 
the blessings of their government, and for ages to come rejoice the departed souls of its 
founders." 

Fellow-citizens ! Ages have passed away since these words were spoken ; but ages are 
the years of the exi'stence of nations. The founders of this immense temple of freedom 
have all departed, save here and there a solitary exception, even while I speak, at the 
point of taking wing. The prayer of Lafayette is not yet consummated. Ages upon 



16 

ages are still to pasa away before it can have its full accomplishment ; and, for its fbll 
accomplishment, his spirit, hovering over our heads, in more than echoes talks around 
these walls. It repeats the prayer which from his lips fifty years ago was at once a 
parting blessing and a prophecy ; for, were it possible for the whole human race, now 
breathmg the breath of life, to be assembled within this hall, your oi'ator would, in your 
name and in that of your constituents, appeal to them to testify for your fathers of the 
liist generation, that, so far as has depended upon them, ti.L ulessing of Lafayette has 
been prophecy. Yes ! this immense ten)ple of freedom still stands, a lesson to oppres- 
sors, an example to the oppressed, and a sanctuary for the rights of mankind. Yes! 
■with the smiles of a benignant Provideuce, the splendor and prosperity of these happy 
United States have illustrated the blessings of their government, and, we may humbly 
hope, have rejoiced tiie departed souls of its founders. For the past your fathers and 
you have been responsible. The charge of the future devolves upon you and upon your 
children. The vestal fire of freedom is in your custody. May the souls of its departed 
f )uaders never be called to witness its extinction by neglect, nor a soil upon the purity 
of its kee|)ers ! 

With this valedictory, Lafayette took, as he and those who heard him then believed, 
a final leave of the people of the United States. He returned to France, and arrived 
at Paris on the 25th of January, 17S5. 

He contiimed to take a deep interest in the concerns of the United States, and exerted 
his infiuence with the French government to obtain reductions of duties favorable to 
their commerce and fisheries. In the summer of 1786, he visited several of the German 
courts, and attended the last great review by Frederick the Second of his veteran army 
— a review unusually splendid, and specially remarkable by the attendance of many of 
the most distinguished military commanders of Europe. In the same year the Legisla- 
ture of Virginia manifested the continued recollection of his services rendered to the 
people of that commoinvealth, by a complimentary token of gratitude not less honorable 
than, it was unusual. They resolved that two busts of Lafayette, to be executed by the 
celebrated sculptor, Houdon, should be procured at their expense ; that one of them 
should be placed in their own legislative hall, and the other presented, in their name, to 
the municipal authorities of the ciiy of Paris. It was accordingly presented by Mr. 
Jefferson, then Minister Plenipotetitiary of the United States in France, and, by the per- 
mission of Louis the Sixteenth, was accepted, and, with appropriate solemnity, placed in 
one of the halls of the Hotel de Ville of the metropolis of France. 

We have gone tluough one stage of the life of Lafayette : we are now to see him 
acting upon another theatre — in a cause still essentially the same, but in the application 
of its principles to his own country. 

The immediately originating question which occasioned the French Revolution was 
the same with that from which the American Revolution had sprung — taxation of the 
people without their consent. For nearly two centuries the kings of France had been 
accustomed to levy taxes upon the people by royal ordinances. But it was necessa];y 
that these ordinances should be registered in the parliaments or judicial tribunals ; and 
these parliaments claimed the right of remonstrating against them, and sometimes retlised 
the registry of them itself. The members of the parliaments held their offices by purchase, 
but were appointed by the king, and were subject to banishment or imprisonment, at his 
pleasure. Louis the Fifteenth, towards the close of his reign, had abolished the parlia- 
ments, but they had been restored at the accession of his successor. 

The finances of the kingdom were in extreme disorder. The minister, or comptroller 
general, De Calonne, after attempting various projects for obtaining the supplies, the 
amount and need of which he was with lavish hand daily increasing, bethought himself, 
at last, of calling for the counsel of others. He prevailed upon the king to convoke, not 
the states general, but an assembly of notables. There was something ridiculous in the 
very name by which this meeting w^as called, but it consisted of a selection from all the 
grandees and dignitaries of the kingdom. The two brothers of the king — all the princes 
of the blood, archbishops and bishops, dukes and peers — the chancellor and presiding 
members of the parliaments ; distinguished members of the noblesse, and the mayors and 
chief magistrates of a few of the principal cities of the kingdom, congtitutod this assembly. 



17 

It was a representation of every interest but that of the people. They were appointed 
by the king — 'were members of the highest aristocracy, and were assembled with the 
desio-n that their deliberations should be confined exclusively to the subjects submitted to 
their consideration by the minister. These were certain plans devised by him for replen- 
ishing the insolvent treasury, by assessments upon the privileged classes, the very princes, 
nobleSj ecclesiastics, and magistrates exclusively represented in the assembly itself. 

Of this meeting the Marquis de Lafayette was a member. It was held in February, 
.1787, and terminated in the overthrow and banishment of the minister by whom it had 
been convened. In the fiscal concerns which absorbed the care and attention of others, 
Lafayette took comparatively little interest. His views were more comprehensive. 

The assembly consisted of one hundred and thirty-se.ven persons, and divided itself 
into seven sections or bureaux, each presided by' a prince of the blood. Lafayette was 
allotted to the division under the presidency of the Count d'Artois, the younger brother 
of the king, and since known as Charles the Tenth. The propositions made by La-f 
fayette were — 

1. The suppression of Letters de Cachet, and the abolition of all arbitrary imprisonmen!. 

2. The establishment of religious toleration, and the restoration of the protestants to 
their civil rights. 

3. The convocation of a national assembly, representing the people of France — per- 
sonal liberty — religious liberty — and a representative assembly of the people. These 
were his demands. 

The first and second of them produced, perhaps, at the time, no deep impression upoti 
the assembly, nor upon the public. Arbitrary imprisonment, and the religious persecu- 
tion of the protestants had become universally odious. They were worn-out instruments, 
even in the hands of those who wielded them. There was none to defend them. 

But the demand for a national assembly startled the prince at the head of the bureau. 
What ! said the Count d'Artois, do you ask for the states general ? Yes, Sir, was the 
answer of Lafa} ette, and for something yet better. You desire, then, replied the prince, 
that I should take in writing, and report to the king, that tl>e motion to convoke the states 
general has been made by the Marquis de Lafayette ? " Yes, Sir ;" and the name of 
Lafayette was accordingly reported to the king. 

The assembly of notables was dissolved — De Calonne was displaced and banished, and 
his successor undertook to raise the needed funds, by the authority of royal edicts. The 
war of litigation with the parliaments recommenced, which terminated only with a posi- 
tive promise that the states general should be convoked. 

From that time a total revolution of government in France was in progress. It has 
been a solemn, a sublime, often a most painful, and yet, in the contemplation of great 
results, a refreshing and cheering contemplation. I cannot follow it in its overwhelming 
multitude of details, even as connected with the life and character of Lafayette. A second 
assembly of notables succeeded the first ; and then an assembly of the states general, first 
to deliberate in separate orders of clergy, nobility, and third estate ; but, finally, consti- 
tuting itself a national assembly, and forming a constitution of limited monarchy, with an 
hereditary royal executive, and a legislature in a single assembly representing the people. 

Lafayette was a member of the states general first assembled. Their meeting was 
signalized by a struggle between the several o^rders of which they were composed, which 
resulted in breaking them all down into one natioftal assembly. 

The convocation of the states general had, in one respect, operated, in the progress of 
the French Revolution, like the Declaraiion of Independence in that of North America, 
It had changed the question in controversy. It was, on the part of tlie King of France,- 
a concession that he had no lawful power to tax the people without their consent. The 
states general, therefore, met with this admission already conceded by the king. In the 
American conflict the British government never yielded the concession.^ They under- 
took to maintain their supposed right of arbitrary taxation by force ; and tlien- the people 
of the colonies renounced all community of government, not only with the king and 
parUament, but with the British nation. Tliey reconstructed the fabric of government 
for themselves, and held the people of Britain as foreigners — friends in peace — enemie» 
in war. 



18 

The concession by Louis the Sixteenth, implied in the convocation of the states gen. 
eral, was a virtual surrender of absolute power — an acknowledgment that, as exercised by 
himself and his predecessors, it had been usurped. It was, in substance, an abdication 
of his crown. There was no power which he exercised as King of France, the lawful- 
ness of which was not contestable on the same principle which denied him the right of 
taxation. When the assembly of the states general met at Versailles, in May, 1789, 
there was but a shadow of the royal authority left. They felt that the power of the 
nation was in tlieir hands, and they were not sparing in the use of it. The representa- 
lives of the third estates, double in numbers to those of the clergy and the nobility, con- 
stituted themselves a national assembly, and, as a signal for the demolition of all privileged 
orders, refused to deliberate in separate chambers, and thus compelled tiie representatives 
of the clergy and nobility to merge their separate existence in the general mass of the 
popular representation. 

Thus the edifice of society was to be reconstructed in France as it had been in 
America. The king made a feeble attempt to overawe the assembly, by, calling regi- 
ments of troops to Versailles, and surrounding with them the hall of their meeting. But 
there was defection in the army itself, and even the person of the king soon ceased to 
be at his own disposal. On the 11th of July, 1789, in the midst of the fermentation 
which had succeeded the fall of the monarchy, and while the assembly was surrounded 
by armed soldiers, Lafayette presented to them his Declaration of Rights — the first 
declaration of human rights ever proclaimed in Europe. It was adopted, and became 
the basis of that which the assembly promulgated with their constitution. 

It was in this hemisphere, and in our own country, that all its principles had been 
imbibed. At the very moment when the Declaration was presented, the convulsive 
struggle between the expiring monarchy and the new-born but portentous anarchy of the 
Parisian populace was taking place. Tiie royal palace and the hall of the assembly were 
surrounded with troops, and insurrection was kindling at Paris. In the midst of the 
popular commotion, a deputation of sixty members, with Lafayette at their head, was 
sent from the assembly to tranquillize the people of Paris, and that incident was the 
occasion of the institution of the National Guard throughout tiie realm, and of the appoint- 
ment, with the approbation of the king, of Lafayette as their general commander-in-chief. 

This event, without vacating his seat in the national assembly, connected him at once 
with the military and the popular movemeut of the revolution. The National Guard was 
the armed militia of the whole kingdom, embodied for the preservation of order, and the 
protection of persons and property, as well as for the establishment of the liberties of the 
people. In his double capacity of commander-general of this force, and of a representa- 
tive in the constituent assembly, his career, for a period of more than three years, was 
beset with the most imminent dangers, and with difficulties beyond all human power to 
surmount. 

The ancient monarchy of France had crumbled into ruins. A national assembly, formed 
by an irregular representation of clergy, nobles, and third estate, after melting at the 
fire of a revolution into one body, had transformed itself into a constituent assembly 
representing the people, had assumed the exercise of all the powers of government, 
extorted from the hands of the king, and undertaken to form a constitution for the French 
nation, founded at once upon the theory of human rights, and upon the preservation of 
a royal hereditary crown upon the head of Louis the Sixteenth. Lafayette sincerely 
believed that such a system would not be absolutely incompatible with the nature of 
things. An hereditary monarchy, surrounded by popular institutions, presented itself to 
his imagination as a practicable form of government ; nor is it certain that even to his 
last days he ever abandoned this persuasion. The element of hereditary monarchy in 
this constitution was indeed not congenial to it. The prototype from which the whole 
fabric had been drawn, had no such element in its composition. A feeling of generosity, 
of compassion, of commiseration with the unfortunate prince then upon tlie throne, who 
had been his sovereign, and for his ill-fated family, mingled itself, perhaps unconsciously 
to himself, with his well-reasoned faith in the abstract principles of a republican creed. 
The total abolition of the monarchical feature undoubtedly belonged to his theory, but the 
family of Bourbon had still a strong hold on the afliections of the French people ; history 



had not made up a record favorable to the establishment of elective kings — a strong 
executive head was absolutely necessary to curb the impetuosities of the people of France ; 
and the same doctrine which played upon the fancy, and crept upon the kind-hearted 
benevolence of Lafayette, was adopted by a large majority of the national assembly, 
sanctioned by the suflrages of its most intelligent, virtuous, and patriotic members, and 
was finally embodied in that royal democracy the result of their labors, sent forth to 
the world, under the guaranty of numberless oaths, as the Constitution of France for all 
aftertime. 

But, during the same period, after the first meeting of the states general, and while 
they were in actual conflict with the expiring energies of the crown, and with the exclu- 
sive privileges of the clergy and nobility, anoiher portentous power had arisen, and 
entered with terrific activity into the controversies of the lime. This was the power ot 
popular insurrection, organized by voluntary associations of clubs, and impelled to action 
by the municipal authorities of the city of Paris. 

The first movements of the people in the state of insurrection took place on the 12th 
of July, 1789, and issued in the destruction of the Bastile, and in the murder of its 
governor, and of several other persons, hung up at lamp-posts, or torn to pieces by the 
li'enzied multitude, without form of trial, and without shadow of guilt. 

The Bastile had long been odious as the place of confinement of persons arrested by 
arbitrary orders for offences against the government, and its destruction was hailed by 
most of the friends of liberty throughout the world as an act of patriotism and magna- 
nimity on the part of the people. The brutal ferocity of the murders was overlooked 
or palliated in the glory of the achievement of razing to its foundations the execrated 
citadel of despotism. But, as the summary justice of insurrection can manifest itself 
only by destruction, the example once set became a precedent tor a series of years for 
scenes so atrocious, and for butcheries so merciless and horrible, that memory revolts at 
the task of recalling them to the mind. 

It would be impossible, within the compass of this discourse, to follow the details of 
the French^evolution to the final dethronement of Louis the Sixteenth, and the extinc- 
tion of the constitutional monarchy of France, on the 10th of August, 1792. During 
that period, the two distinct powers were in continual operation — sometimes in concert 
with each other, sometimes at irreconcilable opposition. Of these powers, one was the 
people of France, represented by the Parisian populace in insurrection ; the other was 
the people of France, represented successively by the constituent assembly, which formed 
the constitution of 1791, and by the legislative assemblyv elected to carry it into exe- 
cution. 

The movements of the insurgent power were occasionally convulsive and cruel, with- 
out mitigation or mercy. Guided by secret springs ; prompted by vindictive and san- 
guinary ambition, directed by hands unseen to objects of individual aggrandizement, its 
agency fell like the thunderbolt, and swept like the whirlwind. 

Tlie proceedings of the assemblies were deliberative and intellectual. They began 
by grasping at the whole power of the monarchy, and they finished by sinking under 
the dictation of the Parisian populace. The constituent assembly numbered among its 
members many individuals of great ability, and of pure principles, but they were over- 
awed and domineered by that other representation of the people of France, which, 
through the instrumentality of the jacobin club, and the municipality of Paris, discon- 
certed the wisdom of the wise, and scattered to the winds the counsels of the prudent. 

It was impossible that, under the perturbations of such a controlling power, a consti- 
tution suited to the character and circumstances of the nation should be formed. 

Through the whole of this period, the part performed by Lafayette was without paral- 
lel in history. The annals of the human race exhibit no other instance of a position 
comparable for its unintermitted perils, its deep responsibilities, and its providential issues, 
with that wiiich he occupied as commander-general of the national guard, and as a lead- 
ing member of the constituent assembly. In the numerous insurrections of the people, 
he saved the lives of multitudes devoted as victims, and always at the most imminent 
hazard of his own. On the 5th and 6th of October, 1789, he saved the lives of Louis 
the Sixteenth, and of his queen. He escaped, time after time, the daggers sharpened 



20 

by princely conspiracy on one hand, and by popular frenzy on the other. He witnessed, 
too, without being able to prevent it, the butchery of Foulon before his eyes; and the 
reeking heart of Berthier, torn from his lifeless trunk, was held up in exulting triumph 
before him. On this occasion, and on another, he threw up his commission as com- 
mander of the national guards ; but who could have succeeded him, even with equal 
power to restrain these volcanic excesses? At the earnest solicitation of those who 
well knew that his place could never be supplied, he resumed and continued in the com- 
mand until the solemn proclamation of the constitution, upon which he definitely laid it 
down, and retired to private life upon his estate in Auvergne. 

As a member of the constituent assembly, it is not in the detailed organization of the 
government which they prepared, that his spirit and co-operation is to be traced. It is 
in the j)rinciples which he proposed and infused into the system. As, at the first assem- 
bly of notables, his voice had been raised for the abolition of arbitrary imprisonment, for 
the extinction of religious intolerance, and for the representation of the people, so, in 
the national assembly, besides the Declaration of Rights, which formed the basis of the 
constitution itself, he made or supported the motions for the establishment of trial by 
jury, for the gradual emancipation of slaves, for the freedom of the press, for the abo- 
lition of all tilles of nobility, and for the declaration of equality of all the citizens, and 
the suppression of all the privileged orders, without exception of the princes of the royal 
family. Thus while as a legislator he was spreading the principles of universal liberty 
over the whole surface of the State, as commander-in-chief of the armed force of the 
nation he was controlling, repressing, and mitigating, as far as it could be effected by 
human power, the excesses of the people. 

The constitution was at length proclaimed, and the constituent national assembly was 
dissolved. In advance of this e\eni, the sublime spectacle of the Federation was ex. 
hibited on the 14th of July, 1790, the first anniversary of the destruction of the Bastile. 
There was an ingenious and fanciful association of ideas in the selection of that day. 
The Bastile was a state prison, a massive structure, which had stood four hundred years, 
every stone o^ which was saturated with sighs and tears, and echoed the groans of four 
centuries of oppression. It was the very type and emblem of the despotism which had 
so long weighed upon France. Demolished from its summit to its foundation at the first 
shout of freedom from the people, what day could be more appropriate than its anniver- 
sary for the day of solemn consecration of the new fabric of government, founded upon 
the rights of i nan? 

I shall not describe the magnificent and melancholy pageant of that day. It has been 
done by abler hands, and in a style which could only be weakened and diluted by repe- 
tition.* The religious solemnity of the mass was performed by a prelate, then eminent 
among the members of the assembly and the dignitaries of the land ; still eminent, after 
surviving the whole circle of subsequent revolutions. No longer a father of the church, 
but among the most distinguished laymen and most celebrated statesmen of France, his 
was the voice to invoke the blessing of heaven upon this new constitution for his liberated 
country ; and he and Louis the Sixteenth, and Lafayette, and thirty thousand delegates 
from all the confederated national guards of the kingdom, in the presence of Almighty 
God, and of five hundred thousand of their countrymen, took the oath of fidelity to the 
nation, to the constitution, and all, save the monarch himself, to the king. His corre- 
sponding oath was, of fidelity to discharge the duties of his high oflice, and to the people. 

Alas ! g.nd was it all false and hollow ? had these oaths no more substance than the 
breath that ushered them to the winds ? It is impossible to look back upon the short and 
turbulent existence of this royal democracy, to mark the frequent paroxysms of popular 
fren?y by which it was assailed, and the catastrophe by which it perished, and to believe 
that the vows of all who swore to support it were sincere. But as well might the sculptor 
of a block of rnarble, after exhausting his genius and his art in giving it a beautiful 
liuman form, call God to witness that it shall perform all the functions of animal life, as 
the constituent assembly of France could pledge the faith of its members that their royal 
jdenjocracy should work as a permanent organized form of government. The Declara- 

♦ In the AJdrMS to the young men of Boston, by Edward Everett. 



21 

don of Rights contained all the principles essential to freedom. The frame of govern- 
ment was radically and irreparably defective. The hereditary royal executive was itself 
an inconsistency Avith the Declaration of Rights. The legislative power, all concen- 
trated in a single assembly, was an incongniity still more glaring. These were both 
departures from the system of organization which Lafliyette had witnessed in the Ameri- 
can constitutions : neither of them was approved by Lafayette. In deference to the 
prevailing opinions and prejudices of the times, he acquiesced in them, and he was des- 
tined to incur the most imminent hazards of his life, and- to make the sacrifice of all that 
gives value to lile itself, in faithful adherence to that constitution which he had sworn 
to support. 

Shortly after his resignation, as commander-general of the national guards, the friends 
of liberty and order presented him as a candidate for election as mayor of Paris ; 
but he had a competitor in the person of Pethion, more suited to the party, pursuing 
with inexorable rancor the abolition of the monarchy and the destruction of tlie king ; 
and, what may seem scarcely credible, the remnant of the party which still adhered to 
the king, the king himself, and above all, the queen, favored the election of the Jacobin 
Pethion, in preference to that of Lafayette. They were, too fatally for themselves, 
successful. 

From the first meeting of the legislative assembly, under the constitution of 1791, 
the destruction of the king and of the monarchy, and the establishment of a republic, by 
means of the popular passions and of popular violence, were the deliberate purposes of 
its leading members. The spirit with which the revolution had been pursued, iVom the 
time of the destruction of the Bastile, had caused the emigration of great numbers of 
the nobility and clergy ; and, among them, of the two brothers of Louis the Sixteenth, 
and of several other princes of his blood. They had applied to all the other great 
monarchies of Europe for assistance to uphold or restore the crumbling monarchy of 
France. The French reformers themselves, in the heat of their political fanaticism, 
avowed, without disguise, the design to revolutionize all Europe, and had emissaries in 
every country, openly or secretly preaching the doctrine of insurrection against all 
established governments. Louis the Sixteenth, and his queen, an Austrian princess, 
sister to the Emperor Leopold, were in secret negotiation with the Austrian government 
for the rescue of the king and royal family of France from the dangers with which 
they were so incessantly beset. In the Electorate of Treves, a part of the Germanic 
Empire, the emigrants from France were assembling, with indications of a design to 
enter France in hostile array, to effect a counter-revolution ; and the brothers of the 
king, assuming a position at Coblentz, on the borders of their country, were holding 
councils, the olyect of which was to march in arms to Paris, to release the king from 
captivity, and to restore the ancient monarchy to the dominion of absolute power. 

The king, who even before his forced acceptance of the constitution of 1791, had 
made an unsuccessful attempt to escape from his palace prison, was in April, 1792, 
reduced to the humiliating necessity of declaring war against the very sovereigns who 
were arming their nations to rescue him from his revolted subjects. Three armies, 
each of fifty thousand men, were levied to meet the emergencies of this war, and were 
placed under the command of Luckner, Rochambeau, and Lafayette. As he passed 
through Paris to go and take the command of his army, he appeared before the legis- 
lative assembly, the president of which, in addressing him, said that the nation would 
oppose to their enemies the constitution and Lafayette. 

But the enemies to the constitution were within the walls. At this distance of time, 
when most of the men, and many of the passions of those days, have passed away, when 
the French Revolution, and its results, should be regarded with the searching eye of 
philosophical speculation, as lessons of experience to after ages, may it even now be 
permitted to remark how much the virtues and the crimes of men, in times of political 
convulsion, are modified and characterized by the circumstances in which they are 
placed. The gi'eat actors of the tremendous scenes of revolution of those times were 
men educated in schools of high civilization, and in the humane and benevolent precepts 
of the Christian religion. A small portion of them were vicious and depraved ; but the 
great majority were wound up to madness by that war of conflicting interests and ab- 



S3 

sorbing passions, enkindled by a great convulsion of the social system. It has been 
said, by a great master of human nature, — 

" In peace, there's nothin<» so becomes a man 
As modest stillness and humility ; 
But when the blast of war blows in your ears, 
Then imitate the action of the tiger. 

Too faithfully did the people of France, and the leaders of their factions, in that war of 
all the political elements, obey that injunction. Who, that lived in that day, can re- 
member? who, since born, can read, or bear to be told, the horrors of the 20th of June, 
the 10th of August, the 2d and 3d of September, 1792, of the 31st of May, 1793, and 
of a multitude of others, during which, in dreadful succession, the murderers of one day 
were the victims of the next, until that, when the insurgent populace themselves were 
shot down by thousands, in the very streets of Paris, by the military legions of the con- 
vention, and the rising fortune and genius of Napoleon Bonaparte ? Who can remember, 
or read, or hear, of all this, without shuddering at the sight of man, his fellow-creature, 
in the drunkenness of political frenzy, degrading himself beneath the condition of the 
cannibal savage ? beneath even the condition of the wild beast of the desert ? and who, 
but with a feeling of deep mortification, can reflect, that the rational and immortal being, 
to the race of which he himself belongs, should, even in his most palmy state of intellectual 
cultivation, be capable of this self-transformation to brutality ? 

In this dissolution of all the moral elements which regulate the conduct of men in their 
social condition — in this monstrous, and scarcely conceivable spectacle of a king, at the 
head of a mighty nation, in secret league with the enemies against whom he has pro- 
claimed himself at war, and of a legislature conspiring to destroy the king and constitution 
to which they have sworn allegiance and support, Lafayette alone is seen to preserve his 
fidelity to the king, to the constitution, and to his country, 

" Unshaken, unseduced, unterrified. 
His loyalty he Itept, his love, his zeal." 

On the 16th of June, 1792, four days before the first violation of the palace of the 
Tuilleries by the populace of Paris, at the instigation of the jacobins, Lafayette, in a letter 
to the legislative assembly, had denounced the jacobin club, and called upon the assembly 
to suppress them. He afterwards repaired to Paris in person, presented himself at the 
bar of the assembly, repeated his denunciation of the club, and took measures for sup- 
pressing their meetings by force. He proposed also to the king himself to furnish him 
with means of withdrawing with his family to Compiegne, where he would have been 
out of the reach of that ferocious and bloodthirsty multitude. The assembly, by a great 
majority of votes, sustained the principles of his letter, but the king declined his proti'ered 
assistance to enable him to withdraw from Paris ; and of those upon whom he called to 
march with him, and shut up the hall where the jacobins held their meetings, not more 
than thirteen persons presented themselves at the appointed time. 

He returned to his army, and became thenceforth the special object of jacobin resent- 
ment and revenge. On the 8th of August, on a preliminary measure to the intended 
insurrection of the 10th, the question was taken, after several days of debate, upon a 
formal motion that he should be put in accusation and tried. The last remnant of free- 
dom in that assembly was then seen by the vote upon nominal appeal, or yeas and nays, 
in which four hundred and forty-six votes were for rejecting the charge, and only two 
hundred and twenty-four for sustaining it. Two days after, the Tuilleries were stormed 
by popular insurrection. The unfortunate king was compelled to seek refuge, with his 
family, in the hall of the legislative assembly, and escaped from being torn to pieces by 
an infuriated multitude, only to pass from his palace to the prison, in his way to the 
scaffold. 

This revolution, thus accomplished, annihilated the constitution, the government, and 
the cause for which Lafayette had contended. The people of France, by their acquies- 
cence, a great portion of them by direct approval, confirmed and sanctioned the abolition 
of the monarchy. The armies and their commanders took the same victorious side : 
not a show of resistance was made to the revolutionary torrent, not an arm was lifted to 
restore the fallen monarch to his throne, nor even to rescue or protect his person from 
... ;jrv of his inexorable foes. Lafayette himself would have marched to Pans with 



23 

his army, for the defence of the constitution, but in this disposition he was not seconded 
by his troops. After ascertaining that the effort would be vain, and after arresting at 
Sedan the members of the deputation from the legislative assembly, sent, after their own 
subiugalion, to arrest him, he determined, as the only expedient left him to save his 
honor and his principles, to withdraw both from the army and the country ; to pass into 
a neutral territory, and thence into these United States, the country of his early adoption 
and his fond partiality, where he was sure of finding a safe asylum, and of meeting a 
cordial welcome. 

But his destiny had reserved him for other and severer trials. We have seen him 
struggling for the support of principles, against ihe violence of raging factions, and the 
fickleness of the multitude ; we are now to behold him in the hands of the hereditary 
rulers of mankind, and to witness the nature of their tender mercies to him. 

It Avas in the neutral territory of Liege that he, together with his companions, Latour 
Muubourg, Bureau de Puzy, and Alexandre Lameth, was taken by Austrians, and trans- 
ferred to Prussian guards. Under the circumstances of the case, he could not, by the 
principles of the laws of nations, be treated even as a prisoner of war. He was treated 
as a prisonor of state. Prisoners of state in the monarchies of Europe are always pre- 
sumed guilty, and are treated as if entitled as little to mercy as to justice. Lafayette 
was immured in dungeons, first at Wesel, then at Magdeburg, and finally at Oimutz, in 
^ Muravia. By what right? By none known among men. By what authority ? That 
WL has never been avowed. For what cause 1 None has ever been assigned. Taken 
^ by Austrian soldiers upon a neutral territory, handed over to Prussian jailers ; and, when 
i Frederick William of Prussia abandoned his Austrian ally, and made his separate peace 
!■ with republican France, he retransferred his illustrious prisoner to the Austrians, from 
W. Avhom he had received him, that he might be deprived of the blessing of regaining his 
liberty, even from the hands of peace. Five years was the duration of this imprison- 
^ nient, aggravated by every indignity that could make oppression bitter. That it was 
H intended as imprisonment for hfe, was not only freely avowed, but significantly made 
^ known to him by his jailers ; and while, with aflected precaution, the means of termi- 
8 nating his sufferings by his own act were removed from him, the barbarity of ill usage, 
a of unwholesome food, and of a pestiferous atmosphere, was applied with inexorable 
^ rigor, as if to abridge the days which, at the same time, were rendered as far as possi- 

. ble insupportable to himself. 
-J| Neither the generous sympathies of the gallant soldier. General Fitzpatrick, in the 
II British House of Commons, nor the personal solicitation of Washington, President of the 
j ;«| United States, speaking with the voice of a grateful nation, nor the persuasive accents 
.. of domestic and conjugal affection, imploring the monarch of Austria for the release of 
'* Lafayette, could avail. The unsophisticated feeling of generous nature in the hearts of 
men, at this outrage upon justice and humanity, was manifested in another form. Two 
individuals, private citizens, one of the United States of America, Francis Huger, the 
other a native of the Electorate of Hanover, Doctor Erick BoUmann, undertook at the 
imminent hazard of their lives, to supply means for his escape from prison, and their 
personal aid to its accomplishment. Their design was formed with great address, pur- 
; - sued with untiring perseverance, and executed with undaunted intrepidity. It was frus- 
^trated by accidents beyond tlie control of human sagacity. 

^// To his persecutions, however, the hand of a wise and just Providence had, in its own 
time and in its own way, prepared a termination. The hands of the Emperor Francis, 
tied by mysterious and invisible bands against the indulgence of mercy to the tears of 
a more than heroic wife, were loosened by the more prevaihng eloquence, or rather were 
severed by the conquering sword of Napoleon Bonaparte, acting under instructions from 
the executive directory, then swaying the destinies of France. 

Lafayette and his fellow-sufferers were still under the sentence of proscription issued 
by the faction which had destroyed the constitution of 1791, and murdered the ill-fated 
Louis and his queen. But revolution had followed upon revolution since the downfall 
of the monarchy, on the 10th of August, 1792. The federative republicans of the 
gironde had been butchered by the jacobin repubUcans of the mountain. The mountain 
had been subjugated by the municipality of Paris, and the sections of Paris, by a reor- 



24 

ganization of parties in the national convention, and with aid from the armiee. Brissot 
and his federal associates, Danton and his party, Robespierre and his subaltern demons, 
had successively perished, each by the measure applied to themselves which they had 
meted out to others ; and as no experiment of political empiricism was to be omitted in 
the medley of the French Revolutions, the hereditary executive, with a single legislative 
assembly, was succeeded by a constitution with a legislature in two branches, and a five- 
headed executive, eligible, annually one-fifth, by their concurrent votes, and bearing the 
name of a directory. This was the government at whose instance Laftiyette was finally 
liberated from tlie dungeon of Olmutz. 

But, while this directory were shaking to their deepest foundations all the monarchies 
of Europe ; while they were stripping Austria, the most potent of them all, piecemeal 
of her territories ; while they were imposing upon her the most humiliating conditions 
of peace, and bursting open her dungeons to restore their illustrious countryman to the 
light of day and the blessing of personal freedom, they were themselves exploding by 
internal combustion, divided into two factions, each conspiring the destruction of the 
other. Lafayette received his freedom, only to see the two members of the directoiy, 
who had taken the warmest interest in ejecting his liberation, outlawed and proscribed 
by their colleagues : one of them, Carnot, a fugitive from his country, lurking in banish- 
ment to escape pursuit ; and the other, Barthelemy, deported with fifty members of the 
legislative assembly, without form of trial or even of legal process, to the pestilential 
climate of Guiana. All this was done with the approbation, expressed in the most 
unqualified terms, of Napoleon, and with co-operation of his army. Upon being informed 
of tlie success of this pride's purge, he wrote to the directory that he had with him one 
hundred thousand men, upon whom they might rely to cause to be respected al' the 
measures that they should take to establish liberty upon solid foundations. 

Two years afterwards another revolution directly accomplished by Napoleon himself, 
demolished the directory, the constitution of the two councils, and the solid liberty, to 
the support of which the hundred thousand men had been pledged, and introduced another 
constitution with Bonaparte himsejf for its executive head, as the first of three consuls, 
for five years. 

In the interval between these two revolutions, Lafayette resided for about two years, 
first in the Danish territory of Holstein, and afterwards at Utrecht, in the Batavian Re- 
public. Neither of them had been effected by means or in a manner which could pos- 
sibly meet his approbation. But the consular government commenced with broad pro- 
fessions of republican principles, on the faith of which he returned to France, and for a 
series of years resided in privacy and retirement upon his estate of La Grange. Here, 
in the cultivation of his farm, and the enjoyment of domestic felicity, embittered only by 
the loss in 1807, of that angel upon earth, the' partner of all the vicissitudes of his life, 
he employed his time, and witnessed the upward flight and downward fall of the soldier 
and sport of fortune. Napoleon Bonaparte. He had soon perceived the hoUowness of 
the consular professions of pure republican principles, and withheld liimself from all 
participation in the government. In 1802, he was elected a member of the general 
council of the department of Upper Loire, and in declining the appointment, took occa- 
sion to present a review of his preceding life, and a pledge of his perseverance in the 
principles which he had previously sustained. " Far," said he, " from the scene of public 
affairs, and devoting myself at last to the repose of private life, my ardent wishes are, 
that external peace should soon prove the fruit of those miracles of glory which are 
even now surpassing the prodigies of the preceding campaigns, and that internal peace 
should be consolidated upon the essential and invariable foundations of true liberty. 
Happy that twenty-three years of vicissitudes in my fortune, and of constancy to my 
principles, authorize me to repeat, that if a nation, to recover its rights, needs only the 
will, they can only be preserved by inflexible fidelity to its obligations." 

When the first consulate for five years was invented as one of the steps of the ladder 
of Napoleon's ambilion, he suffered Sieyes, the member of the directory whom he had 
used as an instrument for casting off" that worse than worthless institution, to prepare 
another constitution, of which he took as much as suited his purpose, and consigned the 
rest to oblivion. One of the whef ""s of this new political engine was a conservative senate, 



35 

forming the peerage to sustain the executive head. This body It was the ijterest and th« 
pohcy of Napoleon to conciliate, and he filled it with men who, through all the previous 
stages of the revolution, had acquired and maintained the highest respectability of char- 
acter. Lafayette was urged with great earnestness, by Napoleon himself, to take a seat 
in this senate ; but, after several conferences with the first consul, in which he ascer- 
tained the extent of his designs, he peremptorily declined. His answer to the minister 
of war tempered his refusal with a generous and delicate compliment, alluding at the 
same time to the position which the consistency of his character made it his duty to 
occupy. To the first consul himself, in terms equally candid and explicit, he said, "that, 
from the direction which public affairs were taking, what he already saw, and what it was 
easy to foresee, it did not seem suitable to his character to enter into an order of things 
contrary to his principles, and in which he would have to contend without success, as 
without public utility, against a man to whom he was indebted for great obligations." 

Not long afterwards, when all republican principle was so utterly prostrated that he 
was summoned to vote on the question whether the citizen Napoleon Bonaparte should be 
consul for life, Lafayette added to his vote the following comment : " I cannot vote for 
such a magistracy until the public liberty shall have been sufficiently guarantied ; and ire 
that event I vote for Napoleon Bonaparte." 

He wrote at the same time to the first consul a letter explanatory of his vote, which 
no republican will now read without recognising the image of inordinate and triumphant 
ambition cowering under the rebuke of disinterested virtue. 

" The 1 8th of Brumaire [said this letter] saved France ; and I felt myself recalled by the 
liberal professions to which you had attached your honor. Since then, we have seen 
in the consular power that reparatory dictatorship which, under the auspices of your 
genius, has achieved so much ; yet not so muck as will be the restoration of liberty. It 
is impossible that you, general, the first of that order of men who, to compare and seat 
themselves, take in the compass of all ages, that you should wish such a revolution — so 
many victories, so much blood, so many calamities and prodigies, should have for the 
world and for you no other result than an arbitrary government. The Fi'ench people 
have too well known their lights ultimately to forget them ; but perhaps they are now 
better prepared, than in the time of their effervescence, to recover them usefully ; and 
you, by the force of your character, and of the public confidence, by the superiority of 
your talents, of your position, of your fortune, may, by the re-establishment of liberty, 
surmount every danger, and relieve every anxiety. I have, then, no other than patriotic 
and personal motives for wishing you this last addition to your glory — a permanent 
magistracy ; but it is due to the principles, the engagements, and the actions of my whole 
life, to wait, before giving my vote, until" liberty shall have been settled upon foundations 
worthy of the nation and of you. I hope, general, that you will here find, as heretofore, 
that with the perseverance of my political opinions are united sincere good wishes per- 
sonally to you, and a profound sentiment of my obligations to you." 

The writer of this letter, and he to whom it was addresssd, have, each in his appro- 
priate sphere, been instruments of transcendent power, in the hands of Providence, to 
shape the ends of its wisdom in the wonderful story of the French Revolution. In 
contemplating the part which each of them had acted upon that great theatre of human 
destiny, before the date of the letter, how strange was at that moment the relative position- 
of the two individuals to each other, and to the Avorld ! Lafayette was the foundbr of 
the great movement then in progress for tlie establishment of freedom in France, and' in 
the European world ; but his agency had been all intellectual and moral. He had asserted 
and proclaimed the principles. He had never violated, never betrayed them. Napoleon, 
a military adventurer, had vapored in proclamations, and had the froth of jacobinism 
upon his lips ; but his soul was at the point of his sword. The revolution was to La- 
fayette the cause of human kind ; to Napoleon it was a mere ladder of ambition. 

Yet, at the time when this letter was written, Lafayette, after a series of immense 
sacrifices and unparalleled sufferings, was a pi'ivate citizen, called to account to the 
world for declining to vote for placing Napoleon at the head of the French nation, with, 
arbitrary and indefinite power for life; and Napoleon, amid professions of unbounded 
devotron to liberti/, was, in the face of mankind, asce.t^ding <he steps of an bereditary 

4 



28 

imperial and royal thro4e. Such was their relative position then; what is it now 7 
Has history a lesson for mankind more instructive than the contrast and the parallel of 
their fortunes and their fate ? Time and chance, and the finger of Providence, which 
in every deviation from the path of justice, reserves or opens to itself an avenue of 
return, has brought each of these mighty men to a close of life, congenial to the char- 
acter with which he travelled over its scenes. The consul for life, the hereditary 
emperor and king, expires a captive on a barren rock in the wilderness of a distant 
ocean — separated from his imperial wife — separated from his son, who survives him 
only to pine away his existence, and die at the moment of manhood, in the condition 
of an Austrian prince. The apostle of liberty survives, again to come forward, the ever- 
consistent champion of her cause, and finally to close his career in peace, a republican, 
without reproacifi in death, as he had been without fear throughout life. 

But Napoleon was to be the artificer of his own fortunes, prosperous and adverse. 
He was rising by the sword ; by the sword he was destined to fall. The counsels of 
wisdom and of virtue fell forceless upon his ear, or sunk into his heart only to kindle 
resentment and hatred. He sought no further personal intercourse with Lafayette ; and 
denied common justice to his son, who had entered and distinguished himself in the 
army of Italy, and from whom he withheld the promotion justly due to his services. 

The career of glory, of fame, and of power, of which the consulate for life was but 
the first step, was of ten years' continuance, till it had reached its zenith ; till the 
astonished eyes of mankind beheld the charity scholar of Brienne, emperor, king, and 
protector of the confederation of the Rhine, banqueting at Dresden, surrounded by a 
circle of tributary crowned heads, among whom was seen that very Francis of Austria, 
the keeper, in his Castle of Olmutz, of the republican Lafayette. And upon that day 
of the banqueting at Dresden, the star of Napoleon culminated from the equator. 
Thenceforward it was to descend with motion far more rapid than when rising, till it 
sunk in endless night. Through that long period, Lafayette remained in retirement at 
La Grange. Silent amidst the deafening shouts of victory from Marengo, and Jena, 
and Austerlitz, and Friedland, and Wagram, and Borodino — silent at the conflagration 
of Moscow ; at the passage of the Beresina ; at the irretrievable discomfiture of Leip- 
zic ; at the capitulation at the gates of Paris, and at the first restoration of the Bourbons, 
under the auspices of the inveterate enemies of France — as little could Lafayette par- 
ticipate in the measures of that restoration, as in the usurpations of Napoleon. Louis 
the Eighteenth was quartered upon the French nation as the soldiers of the victorious 
armies were quartered upon the inhabitants of Paris. Yet Louis the Eighteenth, who 
held his crown as the gift of the conquerors of France, the most humiliating of the con- 
ditions imposed upon the vanquished nation, affected to hold it by divine right, and to 
grant, as a special favor, a charter, or constitution, founded on the avowed principle that 
all the liberties of the nation were no more than gratuitous donations of the king. 

Thes<; pretensions, with a corresponding course of policy pursued by the reinstated 
government of the Bourbons, and the disregard of the national feelings and interests of ^ 
France, with which Europe was remodelled at the congress of Vienna, opened the way " 
for the return of Napoleon from Elba, within a year from the time when he had been 
relegated there. He landed as a solitary adventurer, and the nation rallied around him 
with rapture. He came with promises to the nation of freedom as well as of indepen- 
dence. The allies of Vienna proclaimed against him a war of extermination, and rein- 
vaded France with armies exceeding in numbers a million of men. Lafayette had been 
courted by Napoleon upon his return. He was again urged to take his seat in the 
House of Peers, but peremptorily declined, from aversion to its hereditary character. 
He had refused to resume his title of nobility, and protested against the constitution of 
the empire, and the additional act entailing the imperial hereditary crown upon the 
family of Napoleon. But he offered himself as a candidate for election as a member of 
the popular representative chamber of the legislature, and was unanimously chosen by 
the electoral college of his department to that station. 

The battle of Waterloo was the last desperate struggle of Napoleon to recover his 
fallen fortunes, and its issue fixed his destiny for ever. He escaped almost alone from 
the field, and returned a fugitive to Paris, projecting to dissolve by armed force the 



27 

legislative assembly, and, assuming a dictatorial power, to levy a new army, and try the 
desperate chances of another battle. This purpose was defeated by the energy and 
promptitude of Lafayette. At his instance the assembly adopted three resolutions, one 
of which declared them in permanent session, and denounced any attempt to dissolve 
them as a crime of high treason. 

After a feeble and fruitless attempt of Napoleon, througli his brother Lucien. to obtain 
from the assembly itself a temporary dictatorial power, he abdicated the Imperial Crown 
in favor of his infant son ; but his abdication could not relieve France from the deplo- 
rable condition to which he had reduced her. France, from the day of the battle of 
Waterloo, was at the mercy of the allied monarchs ; and, as the last act of their revenge, 
they gave her again the Bourbons. France was constrained to receive them. It was 
at the point of the bayonet, and resistance was of no avail. The legislative assembly 
appointed a provisional council of government, and commissioners, of whom Lafayette 
was one, to negotiate with the allied armies then rapidly advancing upon Paris. 

The allies manifested no disposition to negotiate. They closed the doors of their 
hall upon the representatives of the people of France. They reseated Louis the 
Eighteenth upon his throne. Against these measures Lafayette and the members of the 
assembly had no means of resistance left, save a fearless protest, to be remembered when 
the day of freedom should return. 

From the time of this second restoration until his death, Lafayette, who had declined 
accepting a seat in the hereditary chamber of peers, and inflexibly refused to resume 
his title of nobility, though the charter of Louis the Eighteenth had restored them all, 
was almost constantly a member of the chamber of deputies, the popular branch of the 
legislature. More than once, however, the influence of the court was successful in de- 
feating his election. At one of these intervals, he employed the leisure afforded him 
in revisiting the United States. 

Forty years had elapsed since he had visited and taken leave of them, at the close of 
the revolutionary war. The greater part of the generation for and with whom he had 
fought his first fields, had passed away. Of the two millions of souls to whose rescue 
from oppression he had crossed the ocean in 1777, not one in ten survived. But their 
places were supplied by more than five times their numbers, their descendants and sue- 
cessors. The sentiment of gratitude and affection for Lafayette, far from declining with 
the lapse of time, quickened in spirit as it advanced in years, and seemed to multiply 
with the increasing numbers of the people. Tlie nation had never ceased to sympathize 
with his fortunes, and in every vicissitude of his life, had manifested the deepest interest 
in his welfare. He had occasionally expressed his intention to visit once more the 
scene of his early achievements, and the country which had requited his services by a 
just estimate of their value. In Februar}', 1824, a solemn legislative act, unanimously 
passed by both houses of congress, and approved by the President of the United States, 
charged the chief magistrate of the nation with the duty of communicating to him the 
assurances of grateful and affectionate attachment still cherished for him by the govern, 
ment and people of the United States, and of tendering to him a national ship, with suit- 
able accommodation, for his conveyance to this country. 

Ten yeai-s have passed away since the occurrence of that event. Since then, the 
increase of population within the borders of our Union exceeds, in numbers, the whole 
mass of that infant community to whose hberties he had devoted, in earl}^ youth, his life 
and fortune. His companions and fellow-soldiers of the war of Independence, of whom 
a scanty remnant still existed to join in the universal shout of welcome with which he 
landed upon our shores, have been since, in the ordinary course of nature, dropping 
away : pass but a few short years more, and not an individual of that generation with 
which he toiled and bled in the cause of human kind, upon his first appearance on the 
field of human action, will be left. The gallant officer, and distinguished representative 
of the people, at whose motion, upon this floor, the invitation of the nation was given — 
the chief magistrate by whom, in compliance with the will of the legislature, it was 
tendered — the surviving Presidents of the United States, and their venerable compeer 
signers of the Declaration of Independence, who received him to the arms of private 
friendship, while mingling their voices in the chorus of public exultation and joy, are no 



28 

longer here to ehed the tear of sorrow upon his departure from this earthly scene. They 
all preceded him in the translation to another, and, we trust, a happier world. The 
active, energetic manhood of the nation, of whose infancy he had been the protector and 
benefactor, and who. by the ])rotracted festivities of more than a year of jubilee, mani- 
fested to him their sense of the obligations for which they were indebted to him, are 
already descending into the vale of yeare. The children of the public schools, who 
tlironged in double files to pass in review before him to catch a glimpse of his counte- 
nance, and a smile from his eye, are now among the men and women of the land, rear- 
ing another generation to envy their parents the joy which they Ccin never share, of 
having seen and contributed to the glorious and triumphant reception of Lafayette. 

Upon his return to France, Lafayette was received with a welcome by his country, 
men scarcely less enthusiastic than that with which he had been greeted in this country. 
From his lauding at Havre till his arrival at his residence at La Grange, it was again 
one triumjihal march, rendered but the more striking by the interruptions and obstacles 
of an envious and jealous government. Threats were not even spared of arresting him 
iis a criminal, and holding him responsible for the spontaneous and irrepressible feelings 
manifested by the people in his favor. He was, very soon after his return, again elected 
a member of tiie chamber of deputies, and thenceforward, in that honorable and inde- 
pendent station, was the soul of that steadtiist and inflexible party which never ceased to 
defend, and was ultimately destined to vindicate the liberties of France. 

The government of the Bourbons, from the time of their restoration, was a perpetual 
struggle to leturn to the saturnian times of absolute power. For them the sun and 
moon had stood still, not, as in the miracle of ancient story, for about a whole day, but 
for more than a whole century. Reseated upon their thrones, not, as the Stuarts had 
been in the seventeenth century, by the voluntary act of the same people which had 
expelled them, but by the arms of foreign kings and hoslile armies, instead of aiming, 
by the liberality of their government, and by improving the condition of their people, to 
make them forget the humiliation of the yoke imposed upon them, they labored with un- 
yielding tenacity to make it more galling. They disarmed the national guards ; they 
cramped and crippled the right of suffrage in elections ; they perverted and travestied 
the institution of juries ; they fettered the freedom of the press, and in their external 
policy lent themselves, willing instruments to crush the liberties of Spain and Italy. 
The spirit of the nation was curbed, but not subdued. The principles of freedom pro- 
claimed in the Declaration of Rights of 1789, had taken too deep root to be extirpated. 
Charles the Tenth, by a gradual introduction into his councils of the most inveterate 
adherents to the anti-revolutionary government, was preparing the way for the annihila- 
tion of the charter and of the legislative I'epresentation of the people. In proportion as 
this plan approached to its maturity, the resistance of the nation to its accomplishment 
acquired consistency and organization. The time had been, when, by the restrictions 
upon the right of suftrage, and the control oi the press, and even of the freedom of debate 
in the legislature, the opposition in the chamber of deputies had dwindled down to not 
more than thirty members. But, under a rapid succession of incompetent and unpopular 
administrations, the majority of the house of deputies had passed from the side oi the A 
court to that of the people. In August, 1829, the king, confiding in his imaginary 
strengih, reorganized his ministry by the appointment of men whose reputation was 
itself a pledge of the violent and desperate designs in contemplation. At the first meet- 
ing of the legislative assembly, an address to the king, signed by two hundred and twenty- 
one out of four hundred members, declared to him, in respectful terms, that a con- 
currence of sentiments between his ministers and the nation was indispensable to the 
happiness of the people under his government, and that this concurrence did not exist. 
He replied that his determination was immovable, and dissolved the assembly. A new 
election was held ; and so odious throughout the nation were the measures of the court, 
that, of the two hundred and twenty-one members who had signed the address against 
the ministers, more than two hundred were re-elected. The opposition had also gained 
an accession of numbers in the remaining part of the deputations, and it was apparent 
that, upon the meeting of the assembly, the court party could not be sustained. 

At tills crisis, Charles the Tentii, as if resolved to leave himself not the shadow of a 



pretext to complain of his expulsion from the throne, in defiance of the charter, to the 
observance of which he had solemnly sworn, issued at one and the same time, four ordi- 
nances — the first of which suspended the liberty of tlie press, and prohibited the publi- 
cation of all the daily newspapers and other periodical journals, but by license, revocable 
at pleasure, and renewable every three months ; the second annulled the election of 
deputies, which had just taken place ; the third changed the mode of election prescribed 
by law, and reduced nearly by one-half the numbers of the House of Deputies to be 
elected ; and the fourth commanded the new elections to be held, and fixed a day for 
the meeting of the assembly to be so constituted. 

These ordinances were the immediate occasion of the last revolution of the three days, 
terminating in the final expulsion of Charles the Tenth from the throne, and of himself 
and his family from the territory of France. This was etfccted by an insurrection of the 
people of Paris, which burst forth, by spontaneous and unpremeditated movement, on 
the very day of the promulgation of the four ordinances. The first of these, the sup- 
pression of all the daily newspapers, seemed as if studiously devised to provoke instanta- 
neous resistance, and the conflict of physical force. Had Charles the Tenth issued a 
decree to siiut up all the bakehouses of Paris, it could not have been more fatal to his 
authority. The conductors of the proscribed journals, by mutual engagement among 
themselves, determined to consider the ordinance as unlawful, null and void ; and this 
was to all classes of the people the signal of resistance. The publishers of two of the 
journals, summoned immediately before the judicial tribunal, were justified in their 
resistance by the sentence of the court, pronouncing the ordinance null and void. A 
marshal of France receives the commands of the king to disperse by force of arms the 
population of Paris ; but the spontaneous resurrection of the national guard organizes 
at once an army to defend the liberties of the nation. Lafayette is again called from 
his retreat at La Grange, and by the unanimous voice of the people, confirmed by such 
deputies of the legislative assembly as were able to meet for common consultation at that 
trying emergency, is again placed at the head of the national guard as their commander- 
in-chief. He assumed the command on the second day of the conflict, and on the third 
Charles the Tenth had ceased to reign. He formally abdicated the crown, and his son, 
the Duke d'Angouleme, renounced his pretensions to the succession. But, humble imi- 
tators of Napoleon, even in submitting to their own degradation, they clung to the last 
gasp of hereditary sway, by transmitting all their claim of dominion to the orphan child 
of the Duke de Berri. 

At an early stage of the revolution of 1789, Lafayette had declared it as a principle 
that insurrection against tyrants was the most sacred of duties. He had borrowed this 
sentiment perhaps from the motto of Jefferson — " Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to 
God." The principle itself is as sound as its enunciation is daring. Like all general 
maxims, it is susceptible of very dangerous abuses : the test of its truth is exclusively in 
the correctness of its application. As forming a part of the political creed of Lafayette, 
it has been severely criticised ; nor can it be denied that in the experience of the French 
revolutions, the cases in which popular insurrection has been resorted to, for the extinc- 
tion of existing authority, have been so frequent, so unjustifiable in their causes, so 
atrocious in their execution, so destructive to liberty in their consequences, that the friends 
of freedom, who know that she can exist only under the supremacy of the law, have 
sometimes felt themselves constrained to shrink from the development of abstract truth, 
in the dread of the danger with which she is surrounded. 

In the revolution of the three days of 1830, it was the steady, calm, but inflexible 
adherence of Lafayette to this maxim which decided the fate of the Bourbons. After 
the struggles of the people had commenced, and even while liberty and power were grap- 
pling with each other for life or death, the deputies elect to the legislative assembly, then 
at Paris, held several meetings at the house of their colleague Lafitte, and elsewhere, at 
which the question of resistance against the ordinances was warmly debated, and aver- 
sion to that resistance by force was the sentiment predominant in the minds of a majority 
of the members. The hearts of some of the most ardent patriots quailed within them 
at the thought of another overthrow of the monarchy. All the horrible recollections of 
the reign of terror, the massacre of the prisons in September, the butcheries of the guil- 



80 

lotine from year to year, the headless trunks of Brissot, and Danlon, and Robespierre, 
and last, not least, the iron crown and sceptre of Napoleon himself, rose in hideous sue 
*"ession before them, and haunted their imaginations. They detested the ordinances, but 
hoped that by negotiation and remonstrance with the recreant king, it might yet be pos. 
sible to obtain the revocation of them, and the substitution of a more liberal ministry. 
This deliberation was not concluded till Lafayette appeared among them. From that 
moment the die was cast. They had till then no military leader. Louis Philippe, of 
Orleans, had not then been seen among them. 

In all the changes of government in France, from the first assembly of notables to 
that day, there never had been an act of authority presenting a case for the fair and just 
application of the duty of resistance against oppression, so clear, so unquestionable, so 
fliigrant as this. The violations of the charter were so gross and palpable, that the most 
determined royalists could not deny them. The mask had been laid aside. The sword 
of despotism had been drawn, and the scabbard cast away. A king openly forsworn, 
had forfeited every claim to allegiance; and the only resource of the nation against 
him was resistance by force. This was the opinion of Lafayette, and he declared him- 
self ready to take the command of the national guard, should the wish of the people, 
already declared thus to place him at the head of this spontaneous movement, be con. 
firmed by his colleagues of the legislative assembly. The appointment was accordingly 
conferred upon him, and the second day afterwards Charles the Tenth and his family 
were fiii^itives to a foreign land. 

France was without a government. She might then have constituted herself a re- 
public ; and such was, undoubtedly, the aspiration of a very large portion of her popu- 
lation. But with another, and yet larger portion of her people, the name of republic 
was identified with the memory of Robespierre. It was held in execration ; there was 
imminent danger, if not absolute certainty, that the attempt to organize a republic would 
have been the signal for a new civil war. The name of a republic, too, was hateful to 
all the neighbors of France ; to the confederacy of emperors and kings, which had twice 
replaced the Bourbons upon the throne, and who might be propitiated under the disap- 
pointment and mortification of the result, by the retention of the name of king, and the 
substitution of the semblance of a Bourbon for the reality. 

The people of France, like the Cardinal de Retz, more than two centuries before, 
wanted a descendant from Henry the Fourth, who could speak the language of the 
Parisian populace, and who had known what it was to be a plebeian. They found him 
in the person of Louis Philippe, of Orleans. Lafayette himself was compelled to com- 
promise with his principles, purely and simply republican, and to accept him, first as 
lieutenant-general of the kingdom, and then as hereditary king. There was, perhaps, 
in this determination, besides the motives which operated upon others, a consideration of 
disinterested delicacy, which could be applicable only to himself. If the republic should 
be proclaimed, he knew that the chief magistracy could be delegated only to himself. 
It must have been a chief magistracy for life, which, at his age, could only have been for 
a short term of years. Independent of the extreme dangers and difficulties to himself, 
to his family, and to his country, in which the position which he would have occupied 
might have involved them, the inquiry could not escape his forecast, who, upon his demise, 
could be his successor ? and what must be the position occupied by him I If, at that 
moment, he had but spoken the word, he might have closed his career with a crown upon 
his head, and with a withering blast upon his name to the end of time. 

With the Duke of Orleans himself, he used no concealment or disguise. When the 
crown was offered to that prince, and he looked to Lafayette for consultation, " you know 
(said he) that I am of the American school, and partial to the constitution of the United 
States." So, it seems, was Louis Philippe. "I think with you," said he. "It is 
impossible to pass two years in the United States, without being convinced that their 
government is the best in the world. But do you think it suited to our present circum- 
stances and condition ?" No, replied Lafayette. They require a monarchy surrounded 
by popular institutions. So thought, also, Louis Philippe ; and he accepted the crown 
under the conditions upon which it was tendered to him. 

Lafayette retained the command of the national guard so long as it was essential to 



81 

the settlement of the new order of things, on the basis of order and of freedom ; so long 
as it was essential to control the stormy and excited passions of the Parisian people ; so 
lontT as was necessary to save the ministers of the guilty but fallen monarch from the 
rash and revengeful resentments of their conquerors. When this was accomplished, and 
the people had been preserved from the calamity of shedding in peace the blood of war, 
he once more resigned his command, retired in privacy to La Grange, and resumed his 
post as a deputy in the legislative assembly, which he continued to hold till the close of life. 

His station there was still at the head of tiie phalanx, supporters of liberal principles 
and of constitutional freedom. In Spain, in Portugal, in Italy, and above all in Poland, 
the cause of liberty has been struggling against the hand of power, and, to the last hour 
of his life, they found in Lafiyette a never-failing friend and patron. 

In his last illness, the standing which he held in the hearts of mankind was attested 
by the formal resolution of the House of Deputies, met to make inquiries concerning his 
condition ; and dying, as he did, full of years and of glory, never, in the history of man- 
kind, has a private individual departed more universally lamented by the whole genera 
tion of men whom he has lefc behind. 

Such, Legislators of the North Amrrican Confederate Union, was the life of Gilbekt 
MoTTiKR i)E Lafayette, and the record of bis life is the delineation of his character. 
Consider him as one human being of one thousand millions, his cotemporaries on the 
surface of the terraqueous globe. Among that thousand millions seek for an object 
of comparison with him ; assume for the standard of comparison all the virtues which 
exalt the character of man above that of the brute creation ; take the ideal man, little 
lower than the angels ; mark the qualities of the mind and heart which entitle him to 
this station of pre-eminence in the scale of created beings, and inquire who, that lived in 
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries of the Christian era, combined in himself so 
many of those qualities, so little alloyed witli those which belong to that earthly vesture 
of decay in which the immortal spirit is enclosed, as Lafayette. 

Pronounce him one of the first men of his age, and you have not yet done him justice. 
Try him by that test to which he sought in vain to stimulate the vulgar and selfish spirit 
of Napoleon ; class him among the men who, to compare and seat themselves, must take 
in the compass of all ages ; turn back your eyes upon the records of time ; summon from 
the creation of the world to this day the mighty dead of every age and every clime — 
and where, among the race of merely mortal men, shall one be found, who, as the bene- 
factor of his kind, shall claim to take precedence of Lafayette ? 

There have doubtless been, in all ages, men, whose discoveries or inventions, in the 
world of matter or of mind, have opened new avenues to the dominion of man over the 
material creation ; have increased his means or his faculties of enjoyment ; have raised 
him in nearer approximation to that higher and happier condition, the object of his hopes 
and aspirations in his present state of existence. 

Lafayette discovered no new principle of politics or of morals. He invented nothing 
in science. He disclosed no new phenomenon in the laws of nature. Born and educated 
in the highest order of feudal nobility, under the most absolute monarchy of Europe, in 
possession of an affluent fortune, and master of himself and of all his capabilities at the 
moment of attaining manhood, the principle of republican justice and of social equality 
took possession of his heart and mind, as if by inspiration from above. He devoted 
himself, his life, his fortune, his hereditary honors, his towering ambition, his splendid 
hopes, all to the cause of liberty. He came to another hemisphere to defend her. He 
became one of the most effective champions of our Independence ; but, that once achieved, 
he returned to his own country, and thenceforward took no part in the controversies 
which have divided us. In the events of our revolution, and in the forms of policy which 
we have adopted for the establishment and perpetuation of our freedom, Lafayette found 
the most perfect form of government. He wished to add nothing to it. He would gladly 
have abstracted nothing from it. Instead of the imaginary republic of Plato, or the 
Utopia of Sir Thomas More, he took a practical existing model, in actual operation here, 
and never attempted or wished more than to apply it faithfully to his own countiy. 

It was not given to Moses to enter the promised land ; but he saw it from the summit 
of Pisgah. It was not given to Lafayette to witness the consummation of his wishes in 



93 

the establishment of a republic, and the extinction of all hereditary rule in France. His 
principles were in advance of the age and hemisphere in which he lived. A Bourbon 
still reigns on the throne of France, and it is not for us to scrutinize the title by which 
he reigns. 'J'he principles of elective and hereditary power, blended in reluctant union 
in his person, like the red and white roses of York and Lancaster, ma}- postpone to after, 
time the last conflict to which they must ultimately come. The life of the patriarch was 
not long enough for the development of his whole political system. Its final accomplish- 
ment is in the womb of time. 

The anticipation of this event is the more certain, from the consideration that all the 
principles for which Lafayette contended were practical. He never indulged himself in 
wild and fanciful speculations. The principle of hereditary power was, in his opinion, 
the bane of all republican liberty in Europe. Unable to extinguish it in the revolution 
of 1830, so far as concerned the chief magistracy of the nation, Lafayette had the satis- 
faction of seeing it abolished with reference to the peerage. An hereditary crown, stript 
of the support which it n^ay derive from an hereditary peerage, however compatible with 
Asiatic despoUsni, is an anomaly in the history of the Christian world, and in the theory 
of free government. There is no arginnent producible against the existence of an heredi- 
tary peerage, but applies with aggravated weight against the transmission, from sire to 
son, of an hereditary crown. The prejudices and passions of the people of France 
rejected the principle of inherited power, in every station of public trust, excepting the 
first and highest of them all ; but there they clung to it, as did the Israelites of old to 
the savory deities of Egypt. 

This is not the time or the place for a disquisition upon the comparative merits, as a 
system of government, of a republic, and a monarchy surrounded by republican institu- 
tions. Upon this, subject there is among us no diversity of opinion ; and if it should take 
the people of France another half century of internal and external war, of dazzling and 
delusive glories ; of unparalleled triumphs, humiliating reverses, and bitter disappoint- 
ments, to settle it to their satisfaction, the ultimate result can only bring them to the point 
where we have stood from the day of the Declaration of Independence — to the point 
where Lafayette would have brought them, and to which he looked as a consummation 
devoutly to be wished. 

Then, too, and then only, will be the time when the character of Lafayette will be 
appreciated at its true value throughout the civilized world. When the principle of 
hereditary dominion shall be extinguished in all the institutions of France ; w hen gov- 
ernment shall no longer be considered as property transmissible from sire to son, but as 
a trust committed for a limited time, and then to return to the people whence it came ; 
as a burdensome duty to be discharged, and not as a reward to be abused ; when a claim, 
any claim, to political power by inheritance shall, in the estimation of the whole French 
people, be held as it now is by the whole people of the North American Union — then 
will be the time for contemplating the character of Lafayette, not merely in the events 
of his life, but in the full development of his intellectual conceptions, of his fervent 
aspirations, of the labors and perils and sacrifices of his long and eventful career upon 
earth ; and thenceforward, till the hour when the trump of the archangel shall sound to 
announce that time shall be no more, the name of Lafayette shall stand enrolled upon the 
annals of our race, high on the list of the pure and disinterested benefactors of mankind. 



APPENDIX. 



PROCEEDINGS IN CONGRESS. 



In the House of Representatives, 

June 21, 1834. 
Mr. John Quincy Adams moved the fol- 
lowing resolution, viz. 

Resolved, That a committee be apjyointed, on the part 
of this House, to join such committee as may be appointed 
on the part of the Senate, to consider and report by what 
token of respect and affection it may be proper for the 
Congress of the United Slates to express the deep sensi- 
bihty of the nation to the event of the decease of General 
Lafavette. 

The resolution being read, the question 
was put, that the House do agree thereto, 
and passed in the alRrmative unanimously. 
It was then 

Ordered, That the Committee on the part 
of this House consist of one member from 
each State ; and 
Mr. John Quincy x\dams, of Massachusetts, 

McIntire, of Maine, 

Hubbard, of New-Hampshire, 

Burgess, of Rhode Island, 

Barber, of Connecticut, 

Allen, of Vermont, 

Cambreleng, of New- York, 

Parker, of New-Jersey, 

Muhlenberg, of Pennsylvania, 

MiLLiGAN, of Delaware, 

McKim, of Maryland, 

Archer, of Virginia, 

Williams, of North Carolina, 

PiNCKNEY, of South Carolina, 

Wayne, of Georgia, 

Johnson,, of Kentucky, 

Blair, of Tennessee, 

Whittlesey, of Ohio, 

Thomas, of Louisiana, 

Carr, of Indiana, 

Cage, of Mississippi, 

Duncjvn, of Illinois, 

Murphy, of Alabama, 

Ashley, of Missouri, 
were appointed the Committee on the part 
of the House. 

Ordered, That the Clerk request the con- 
currence of the Senate in the said resolution. 
A message from the Senate, by Mr. Low- 
rie, their Secretary : 

Mr. Speaker : The Senate have passed the 
resolution for the appointment of a joint 
5 



committee " to consider and report by what 
token of respect and affection it may be 
proper for the congress of the United States 
to express the deep sensibility of the nation 
to the event of the decease of General La- 
fayette," and have appointed a committee 
on their part. 

The committee on the part of the Senate 
are, 

Mr. Webster, Mr. Benton, 
White, Poindexter, 

Calhoun, King, of Alabama, 

Clay, Chambers, 

Forsyth, Brown, and 

Wilkins, Shepley. 

Tyler, 

In the House of Representatives, 

June 24, 1834. 
Mr. John Quincy Adams, from the joint 
committee, appointed on the 21st instant, 
" to consider and report by what token of 
respect and affection it may be proper for 
the Congress of the United States to express 
the deep sensibility of the nation to the event 
of the decease of General Lafayette," re- 
ported the following joint resolutions, viz. 

Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives 
of the United States of America in Congress assembled, 
That the two Houses of Congress have received, with the 
profoundest sensibility, intelligence of the death of General 
Lafavette, the friend of the United States, the friend 
of Washington, and the friend of liberty. 

And be it further resolved, That the sacrifices and ef- 
forts of this illustrious person in the cause of our country, 
during her struggle for independence, and the affectionate 
interest which he has at all times manifested for the suc- 
cess of her political institutions, claim from the govern- 
ment and people of the United States an expression of 
condolence for his loss, veneration for his virtues, and 
gratitude for his services. 

And be it further resolved, That the President of the 
United States be requested to address, together with a 
copy of the above resolutions, a letter to George Wash- 
ington Lafavette, and the other members of his fam- 
ily, assuring them of the condolence of this whole nation 
in their irreparable bereavement. 

And be it further resohed, That the members of the two 
Houses of Congress will wear a badge of mourning for 
thirty days ; and that it be recommended to the people of 
the United States to wear a similar badge for the same 
period. 

And be it further resolved, That the halls of the Houses 
be dressed in mourning for the residue of the session. 



And be it further resolved, That John Cturprcv Adams 
be requested to deliver an Oration on the life and charac- 
ter of General Lafayette, before the two Houses of 
Congress, at the next session. 

The said resolutions were read three times 
successively, and passed unanimously. 

A messa^-e from the Senate, by Mr. Low- 
rie, their Secretary : 

Mr. Speaker: The Senate have passed, 
unanimously, the resolution manifesting the 
sensibility of the two Houses of Congress 
and of the nation on the occasion of the de- 
cease of General Lafayette. 

In the House of Representatives, 

December 9, 1834. 
On motion of Mr. Hubbard, 

Resolved, That a committee be appointed on the part 
of this House, to join such committee as may be appointed 
on the part of the Senate, to consider and report the ar- 
rangements necessary to be adopted in order to carry into 
effect the last resolution reported on the 24th of June, 
1834, by the joint committee appointed at the last session 
of congress, on the occasion of the death of General La- 
fayette. 

Mr. Hubbard, Mr. Lincoln, Mr. White, 
Mr. xIllen, of Virginia, and Mr. Marshall, 
were appointed the said committee. 

Ordered, That the clerk acquaint the Sen- 
ate therewith. 

The Senate concurred in the foregoing 
resolution, December 15th, 1834 ; and Mr. 
Clay, Mr. White, Mr. Calhoun, Mr. Web- 
ster, and Mr. Buchanan, were appointed the 
committee on their part. 

In the House of Representatives, 

December 23, 1834. 
Mr. Hubbard, from the select joint com- 
mittee appointed to consider and report 
what measures were necessary to give ef- 
fect to the resolutions adopted at the last 
session for paying suitable honors to the 
memory of General Lafayette, reported the 
following resolution : 

Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives, 
That Wednesday, the thirty-first instant, be the time as- 
signed for the delivery of the Oration by John Quikcy 
Adams, before the two Houses of Congress, on the life 
and character of General Lafayette. 

That the two Houses shall be called to order by their 
respective presiding officers at the usual hour, and the 
journal of the preceding day shall be read ; but all legis- 
lative business shall be suspended on that day. 

That the Oration shall be delivered at half-past twelve 
o'clock in the hall of the House of Representatives. 

That the President of the United States and the heads 
of the several departments, the French minister and mem- 
bers of the French legation, all other foreign ministers at 
the seat of government, and the members of their respec- 
tive legations, be invited to attend on that occasion by the 
chairman of the joint committee. 

That the President of the United States, the heads of 
the several departments, the French minister and the 
members of the French legation, the other foreign muiis- 
tors at the seat of government, and the members of their 
respective legations, and John GIuincv Adams, be re- 
quested to assemble at lialf-past twelve o'clock, P. M. in 
the Senate chamber, and that they, v.'ith the Senate, shall 
be attended by the joint committee lo llie hall of the House 
of Representatives. 



That the galleries of the House, under the direction of 
its oflicers, shall be open on that day for the accommoda- 
tion of such citizens as may think proper to attend. 

Which was agreed to by the House. 

Ordered, That the clerk acquaint the Sen- 
ate therewith. 

The Senate concurred in the foregoing 
resolution. 

In the House of Representatives, 

December 31, 1834. 

In pursuance of the arrangements reported 
by the joint committee appointed on the 9th 
December instant, to consider and report 
the arrangements necessary to be adopted 
to carry into effect the last resolution re- 
ported on the 24th June, 1834, by the joint 
committee appointed at the last session of 
Congress, on the occasion of the death of 
General Lafayette, the hall was prepared 
for the reception of the Senate, and for the 
guests invited, in accordance with the said 
arrangements. 

At forty minutes past twelve o'clock, the 
Senate of the United States, preceded by 
the Vice President and its Officers, the Pre- 
sident of the United States, the heads of the 
several Executive Departments, the Minis- 
ters of sundry foreign nations at the seat of 
government, and the members of their re- 
spective legations, and John Quincy Adams, 
entered the hall of the House, and took the 
seats prepared for them, respectively. Mr. 
John Quincy Adams was conducted to the 
Speaker's Chair by the Committee of Ar- 
rangements, when the Speaker withdrew, 
and took a seat at the clerk's table with the 
Vice President. 

Mr. John Quincy Adams then rose, and de- 
livered an Oration on the life and charac- 
ter of General Lafayette ; and having, at 
half-past three o'clock P. M., concluded the 
same. 

The Senate, the President of the United 
States, the heads of departments, and the 
foreign ministers and legations, withdrew. 

When the Speaker resumed his seat. 

In the House of Representatives, 

January 2, 1835. 
The following joint resolution was offered 
by Mr. Hubbard : 

Resolved by the Senate and House of Representntivcs, 
That the thanks of Congress be presented to John 
Q,uincy Adams, for the appropriate Oration delivered 
by him on the life and character of General Lafay- 
ette, in the representatives' hall, before both Houses 
of Congress, on the 31st day of December, 1834, and that 
he be requested to furnish a copy for publication. 

Resolved, That tb.e chairman of the joint commilleo 
appointed to make the necessary arrangements to carry 
into effect the resolution of the "last session of this con- 
gress in relation to the death of General Lafayette, be 
requested to commimicate to Mr. Adams the fon-going 
resolution, receive his answer thereto, and present tho 
same to both Ho\ises of Congress. 

Tlic resolution was agreed to, nrm. dis. 



35 



Ordered, that the clerk request the con- 
currence of the Senate therein. 

The Senate concurred in the foregoing 
resohition. 

In the House of Representatives, 

January 6, 1835. 
Mr. Hubbard, from the select joint com- 
mittee appointed on the 2d instant, to de- 
liver the thanks of congress to John Quincv 
Adams, for his appropriate Oration on the 
life and character of Lafayette, reported the 
follow^ing correspondence, viz. 

To the Hon. John Q,uincy Adams : 

Sir : We have the honor to present to you official 
copies of two joint resolutions adopted by the Senate and 
House of Representatives on the 2d instant, expressing 
the thanks of congress for the appropriate Oration deUver- 
ed by you in the hall of the House of Representatives on 
the 31st ultimo, on the life and character of General 
Lafayette, and authorizing a request to be made to 
you for a copy of it for publication. 

Having shared the high gratification of hearing the Ora- 
tion, we take pleasure, m pursuance of the second of the 
joint resolutions, in requesting you to furnish a copy of 
the Oration for publication. 

We have the honor to be, 

With great respect, 

Your obedient servants, 
HENRY CLAY, 
Chairman of Committee on part of Senate. 

HENRY HUBBARD, 
Chairman of Committee on part of House. 
January 5, 1835. 

To Messrs. Henrv Clay and Henry Hubbard, 
chairmen of tlie joint committee of arrangements of the 
Senate and House of Representatives of the United 
States, to carry into effect the resolution of Congress 
in relation to the death of General Lafayette : 

Gentlemen : I receive with deep sensibility your 
communication of the joint resolution of both Houses of 
Congress upon the Oration delivered before them on the 
life and character of Lafayette. 

The kind mdulgence with which they have accepted 
the endeavor to give effect to their purpose of paying a 
last tribute of national gratitude and affection to the 
memory of a great benefactor of our country, will be im- 
pressed upon my heart to the last hour of my life. 

With this sentiment I shall take pleasure "^in furnishing, 
as requested, a copy of the address for publication. 
I am, gentlemen. 

With the highest respect, 

Your fellow-citizen, and obedient servant, 

JOHN aUINCY ADAMS. 



Mr. Hubbard submitted the following pre- 
amble and resolution, viz. 

Whereas it was resolved , at the last session of Congress, 
that John Q,uincy Adams be requested to deliver an 
Oration on the hfe and character of General Lafay- 
ette, before the two Houses of Congress ; and, in pur- 
suance of that resolution, and sundry other resolutions 
which have been subsequently adopted, Mr. Adams, on 
Wednesday, the 31st day of i3ecember, 1834, in the hall 
of the House of Representatives, and in the presence of 
both Houses of Congress, and also in the presence of the 
President of the United States, of the Heads of the re- 
spective Departments of the National Government, and 
of a most numerous assembly of citizens, did deliver an 
Oration replete with those pure and patriotic sentiments 
which will be sacredly cherished by every true and en- 
lightened American : The House of Representatives, 
fully satisfied with the manner in which Mr. Adams has 
performed the duty assigned him, and desirous of commu- 
nicating, "through the medium of the press," those prin- 
ciples which have been by him so ably discussed, as well 
as their sentiments of respect for the distinguished char- 
acter, and their sentiments of gratitude for the devoted 
services of Lafayette, which have been by him, on 
this occasion, so faithfully expressed, have come to the 
following resolution : 

Resolved, That — copies of the Oration be printed for 
the use of the House. 

The Chair remarked that it was neces- 
sary to fill the blank. 

Mr. Hubbard said the committee left it to 
the House to fill the blank. 

Mr. Pearce, of Rhode Island, moved to 
fill the blank with ten thousand. 

Mr. Pinckney moved twenty thousand. 

Mr. Brown moved fifty thousand. 

Mr. Miller moved forty thousand. 

The question being taken on the highest 
number named, (fifty thousand,) it was de- 
cided in the afllrmative by a vote of eighty 
to sixty-one. 

Mr. Evans moved that the resolution be 
amended by inserting at the end of it, " under 
the direction of the committee on the part 
of the House." 

Which motion was agreed to. 



In the Senate, January 7, 1835 
Mr. Clay reported the foregoing corre- 
spondence, which was read ; and, 
On motion of Mr. Clay, 
Ordered, That ten thousand copies be 
printed for the use of the Senate. 



M 



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